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C O K T E N T S. 



CHAPTER I. PAOK 

Youth in Ayrshire 1 

CHAPTER 11. 
First Wixter ix Edinburgh 42 

CHAPTER HI. 
Border and Highland Tours 60 

CHAPTER IV. 
Second Winter in Edinburgh 79 

CHAPTER V. 
Life at Ellisland 94 

CHAPTER VI. 
Migration to Dumfries 134 

CHAPTER VII. 
Last Years 153 

CHAPTER VIIL 

Character, Poems, Songs 186 



ROBERT BURNS 



CHAPTER I. 

YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 

Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, 
grow as we recede from them ; and the rate at which they 
grow in the estimation of men is in some sort a measure 
of their greatness. Tried by this standard, Bnrns must 
be great indeed ; for, during the eighty years that have 
passed since his death, men's interest in the man himself 
and their estimate of his genius have ,been steadily in- 
creasing. Each decade since he died has produced at least 
two biographies of him. When Mr. Carlyle wrote his well- 
known essay on Burns in 1828, he could already number 
six biographies of the Poet, which had been given to the 
world during the previous thirty years; and the interval 
between 1828 and the present day has added, in at least 
the same proportion, to their number. What it was in the 
man and in his circumstances that has attracted so much 
of the world's interest to Burns, I must make one more 
attempt to describe. 

If success were that which most secures men's sympathy. 
Burns would have won but little regard ; for in all but his 



2 ROBERT BURXS. ' [chap. 

poetry his was a defeated life — sad and heart-depressing to 
contemplate beyond the lives even of most poets. 

Perhaps it may be the very fact that in him so much 
failure and shipwreck were combined with such splendid 
gifts, that has attracted to him so deep and compassionate 
interest. Let us review once more the facts of that life, 
and tell again its oft-told story. 

It was on the 25th of January, 1759, about two miles 
from the town of Ayr, in a clay-built cottage, reared by 
his father's own hands, that Robert Burns was born. The 
"auld clay bigging" which saw his birth still stands by 
the side of the road that leads from Ayr to the river and 
the bridge of Doon. Between the banks of that romantic 
stream and the cottage is seen the roofless ruin of "Allo- 
way's auld haunted kirk," which Tarn o' Shanter has made 
famous. His first welcome to the world was a rough one. 
As he himself says — 

" A blast o' Janwar' win' 

Blew hansel in on Robin." 

A few days after his birth, a storm blew down the gable 
of the cottage, and the poet and his mother were carried 
in the dark morning to the shelter of a neighbour's roof, 
under which they remained till their own home was re- 
paired. In after-years he would often say, "No wonder 
that one ushered into the world amid such a tempest 
should be the victim of stormy passions." " It is hard to 
be born in Scotland," says the brilliant Parisian. Burns 
had many hardships to endure, but he never reckoned this 
to be one of them. 

His father, William Burness or Burnes, for so he spelt 
his name, was a native not of Ayrshire, but of Kincardine- 
shire, where he had been reared on a farm belonging to the 



7.] YOTTH IX AYRSHIRE. 3 

forfeited estate of the noble but attainted bouse of Keith- 
Mariscbal. Forced to migrate thence at the age of nine- 
teen, he had travelled to Edinburgh, and finally settled in 
Ayrshire, and at the time when Robert, his eldest child, 
was born, he rented seven acres of land, near the Brig o' 
Doon, which he cultivated as a nursery-garden. He was a 
man of strict, even stubborn integrity, and of strong tem- 
per — a combination which, as his son remarks, does not 
usually lead to worldly success. But his chief character- 
istic was his deep-seated and thoughtful piety. A peasant- 
saint of the old Scottish stamp, he yet tempered the stern 
Calvinism of the West with the milder Arm inianism more 
common in his northern birthplace. Robert, who, amid 
all his after-errors, never ceased to revere his father's mem- 
ory, has left an immortal portrait of him in The Cotter's 
Saturday Nighty when he describes how 

" The saint, the father, and the husband prajs." 

William Burness was advanced in years before he mar- 
ried, and his wife, Agnes Brown, was much younger than 
himself. She is described as an Ayrshire lass, of humble 
birth, very sagacious, with bright eyes and intelligent looks, 
but not beautiful, of good manners and easy address. Like 
her husband, she was sincerely religious, but of a more 
equable temper, quick to perceive character, and with a 
memory stored with old traditions, songs, and ballads, 
which she told or sang to amuse her children. In his 
outer man the poet resembled his mother, but his great 
mental gifts, if inherited at all, must be traced to his father. 

Three places in Ayrshire, besides his birthplace, will al- 
ways be« remembered as the successive homes of Burns. 
These were Mount Oliphant, Lochlea (pronounced Lochly), 
and Mossgiel. 



4 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

Mount Oliphant. — This was a small upland farm, 
about two miles from the Brig o' Doon, of a poor and 
hungry soil, belonging to Mr. Ferguson, of Doon-holm, 
who was also the landlord of William Burness' previous 
holding. Robert was in his seventh year when his father 
entered on this farm at Whitsuntide, 1766, and he had 
reached his eighteenth when the lease came to a close in 
1YY7. All the years between these two dates were to the 
family of Burness one long sore battle with untoward cir- 
cumstances, ending in defeat. If the hardest toil and se- 
vere self - denial could have procured success, they would 
not have failed. It was this period of his life which Rob- 
ert afterwards described, as combining " the cheerless gloom 
of a hermit with the unceasing moil of galley-slave." The 
family did their best, but a niggard soil and bad seasons 
were too much for them. At length, on the death of his 
landlord, who had always dealt generously by him, Wil- 
liam Burness fell into the grip of a factor, whose tender 
mercies were hard. This man wrote letters which set the 
whole family in tears. The poet has not given his name, 
but he has preserved his portrait in colours which are 
indelible : 

" I've noticed, on our Laird's court-day, 
An' mony a time my heart's been wae, 
Poor tenant bodies, scant o' cash, 
How they maun thole a factor's snash ; 
He'll stamp an' threaten, curse and swear, 
He'll apprehend them, poind their gear. 
While they maun stan', wi aspect humble, 
And hear it a', an' fear an' tremble." 

In his autobiographical sketch the poet tells us that, 
" The farm proved a ruinous bargain. I was the eldest of 
seven children, and my father, worn out ])y early hard- 



i.J YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 5 

ship, was unfit for labour. His spirit was soon irritated, 
but not easily broken. There was a freedom in the lease 
in two years more ; and to weather these two years we 
retrenched expenses, and toiled on." Robert and Gilbert, 
the two eldest, though still boys, had to do each a grown 
man's full work. Yet, for all their hardships, these Mount 
Oliphant days were not without alleviations. If poverty 
was at the door, there was warm family affection by the 
fireside. If the two sons had, long before manhood, to 
bear toil beyond their years, still they were living under 
their parents' roof, and those parents two of the wisest 
and best of Scotland's peasantry. Work was no doubt in- 
cessant, but education was not neglected — rather it was 
held one of the most sacred duties. When Robert was 
five years old, he had been sent to a school at Alloway Mill ; 
and when the family removed to Mount Oliphant, his fa- 
ther combined with four of his neighbours to hire a young 
teacher, who boarded among them, and taught their chil- 
dren for a small salary. This young teacher, whose name 
was Murdoch, has left an interesting description of his 
two young pupils, their parents, and the household life 
while he sojourned at Mount Oliphant. At that time 
Murdoch thought that Gilbert possessed a livelier imagina- 
tion, and was more of a wit than Robert. "All the mirth 
and liveliness," he says, " were with Gilbert. Robert's 
countenance at that time wore generally a grave and 
thoughtful look." Had their teacher been then told that 
one of his two pupils would become a great poet, he would 
have fixed on Gilbert. When he tried to teach them 
church music along with other rustic lads, they two lagged 
far behind the rest. Robert's voice especially was untune- 
able, and his ear so dull that it was with difficulty he 
could distinguish one tune from another. Yet this was he 



6 ROBERT BURNS. [niAP. 

who was to bt'coiiie the greatest song-writer that Scotland 
— perhaps the world — has known. In other respects the 
mental training of the lads was of the most thorough 
kind. Murdoch taught them not only ,to read, but to 
parse, and to give the exact meaning of the words, to turn 
verse into the prose order, to supply ellipses, and to sub- 
stitute plain for poetic words and phrases. How many of 
our modern village schools even attempt as much I When 
Murdoch gave up, the father himself undertook the educa- 
tion of his children, and carried it on at night after work- 
hours were over. Of that father Murdoch speaks as by 
far the best man he ever knew. Tender and affectionate 
towards his children he describes him, seeking not to drive, 
but to lead them to the right, by appealing to their con- 
science and their better feelings, rather than to their fears. 
To his wife he was gentle and considerate in an unusual 
degree, always thinking of her ease and comfort ; and she 
repaid it with the utmost reverence. She was a careful 
and thrifty housewife ; but, whenever her domestic tasks 
allowed, she would return to hang with devout attention 
on the discourse that fell from her wise husband. Under 
that father's guidance knowledge was sought for as hid 
treasure, and this search was based on the old and rever- 
ential faith that increase of knowledge is increase of wis- 
dom and goodness. The readings of the household were 
wide, varied, and unceasing. Some one entering the house 
at meal-time found the whole family seated, each with a 
spoon in one hand and a book in the other. The books 
which Burns mentions as forming part of their reading at 
Mount Oliphant surprise us even now. Not only the or- 
dinary school-books and geographies, not only the tradi- 
tional life of Wallace, and other popular books of that sort, 
but The Spectator, odd plays of Shakespeare, Pope (his 



i.J YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 7 

Homer included), Locke on the Human Understanding, 
Boyle's Lectures, Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original 
Sin, Allan Ramsay's works, formed the staple of their 
reading. Above all there was a collection of songs, of 
which Burns says, " This was my vade mecum. I pored 
over them driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by 
song, verse by verse ; carefully noting the true, tender, or 
sublime, from affectation and fustian. I am convinced 1 
owe to this practice much of my critic-craft, such as it is 1" 
And he could not have learnt it in a better way. 

There are few countries in the world which could at 
that time have produced in humble life such a teacher as 
Murdoch and such a father as William Burness. It seems 
fitting, then, that a country which could rear such men 
among its peasantry should give birth to such a poet as 
Robert Burns to represent them. The books which fed his 
young intellect were devoured only during intervals snatch- 
ed from hard toil. That toil was no doubt excessive. And 
this early overstrain showed itself soon in the stoop of 
his shoulders, in nervous disorder about the heart, and in 
frequent fits of despondency. Yet perhaps too much has 
sometimes been made of these bodily hardships, as though 
Burns's boyhood had been one long misery. But the 
youth which grew up in so kindly an atmosphere of wis- 
dom and home affection, under the eye of such a father 
and mother, cannot be called unblest. 

Lender the pressure of toil and the entire want of so- 
ciety. Burns might have grown up the rude and clownish 
and unpopular lad that he has been pictured in his early 
teens. But in his fifteenth summer there came to him a 
new influence, which at one touch unlocked the springs of 
now emotions. This incident must be given in his own 
words : '' You know," he says, " our country custom of 



8 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

coupling a man and woman together as partners in the la- 
bours of the harvest. In my fifteenth summer my partner 
was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. 
My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her 
justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. 
She was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, alto- 
gether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious 
passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse 
prudence, and book -worm philosophy, I hold to be the 
first of human joys here below ! How she caught the 
contagion I cannot tell. . . . Indeed, I did not know 
myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, 
when returning in the evening from our labours ; why the 
tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an 
^olian harp ; and especially why my pulse beat such a 
furious ratan when I looked and fingered over her little 
hand, to pick out the cruel nettle - stings and thistles. 
Among her love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly ; and 
it was her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an 
embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous 
as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, 
composed by men who read Greek and Latin; but my 
girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a 
coantry laird's son, on one of his father's maids, with 
whom he was in love ; and I saw no reason why I might 
not rhyme as well as he ; for, excepting that he could 
shear sheep and cast peats, his father living in the moor- 
lands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself. Thus 
with me began love and poetry." 

The song he then composed is entitled " Handsome 
Nell," and is the first he ever wrote. He himself speaks 
of it as very puerile and silly — a verdict which Chambers 
endorses, but in which I cannot agree. Simple and artless 



I.J YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 9 

it no doubt is, but with a touch of that grace which be- 
speaks the true poet. Here is one verse which, for direct- 
ness of feeling and felicity of language, he hardly ever 



" She dresses aye sae clean and neat, 
Baith decent and genteel, 
And then there's something in her gait 
Gars ony dress look weel." 

" I composed it," says Burns, " in a wild enthusiasm of 
passion, and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart 
melts, my blood sallies at the remembrance." 

LocHLEA. — Escaped from the fangs of the factor, with 
some remnant of means, William Burness removed from 
Mount Oliphant to Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton 
(1777) ; an upland, undulating farm, on the north bank of 
the River Ayr, with a wide outlook, southward over the 
hills of Carrick, westward toward the Isle of Arran, Ailsa 
Craig, and down the Firth of Clyde, toward the Western 
Sea. This was the home of Burns and his family from 
his eighteenth till his twenty-fifth year. For a time the 
family life here was more comfortable than before, proba- 
bly because several of the children were now able to assist 
their parents in farm labour. " These seven years," says 
Gilbert Burns, ''brought small literary improvement to 
Robert" — but I can hardly believe this, when we remember 
that Lochlea saw the composition of The Death and Dying 
Words of Poor Mailie, and of My JVannie, 0, and one or 
two more of his most popular songs. It was during those 
days that Robert, then growing into manhood, first vent- 
ured to step beyond the range of his father's control, and 
to trust the promptings of his own social instincts and 
headlong passions. The first step in this direction was to 
go to a dancing-school, in a neighbouring village, that he 



10 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

might there meet companions of either sex, and give his 
rustic manners " a brush," as he phrases it. The next 
step was taken when Burns resolved to spend his nine- 
teenth summer in Kirkoswald, to learn mensuration and 
surveying from the schoolmaster there, who was famous 
as a teacher of these things. Kirkoswald, on the Carrick 
coast, was a village full of smugglers and adventurers, in 
whose society Burns was introduced to scenes of what he 
calls "swaggering riot and roaring dissipation." It may 
readily be believed that, with his strong love of sociality 
aud excitement, he was an apt pupil in that school. Still 
the mensuration went on, till one day, when in the kail- 
yard behind the teacher's house, Burns met a young lass, 
who set his heart on fire, and put an end to mensuration. 
This incident is celebrated in the song beginning — 

" Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns 
Bring autumn's pleasant weather " — 

'' the ebullition," he calls it, " of that passion which ended 
the school business at Kirkoswald." 

From this time on for several years, love-making was 
his chief amusement, or rather his most serious business. 
His brother tells us that he was in the secret of half the 
love affairs of the parish of Tarbolton, and was never with- 
out at least one of his own. There was not a comely girl 
in Tarbolton on whom he did not compose a song, and 
then he made one which included them all. When he 
was thus inly moved, "the agitations of his mind and 
body," says Gilbert, " exceeded anything of the kind I 
ever knew in real life. He had always a particular jeal- 
ousy of people who were richer than .himself, or had more 
consequence. His love, therefore, rarely settled on persons 
of this description." The jealousy here noted, as extend- 



i] YOUTH IX AYRSHIRE. M 

ino- even to his loves, was one of the weakest points of the 
poet's character. Of the ditties of that time, most of 
which have been preserved, the best specimen is My Nan- 
nie, 0. This song, and the one entitled Mary Morison, 
render the whole scenery and sentiment of those rural 
meetings in a manner at once graphic and free from 
coarseness. Yet, truth to speak, it must be said that 
those gloamin' trysts, however they may touch the imagi- 
nation and lend themselves to song, do in reality lie at 
the root of much that degrades the life and habits of the 
Scottish peasantry. 

But those first three or four years at Lochlea, if not free 
from peril, were still with the poet times of innocence. 
His brother Gilbert, in the words of Chambers, " used to 
speak of his brother as at this period, to himself, a more 
admirable being than at any other. He recalled with de- 
light the days when they had to go with one or two com- 
panions to cut peats for the winter fuel ; because Robert 
was sure to enliven their toil with a rattling fire of witty 
remarks on men and things, mingled with the expressions 
of a genial, glowing heart, and the whole perfectly free 
from the taint which he afterwards acquired from his con- 
tact with the world. Not even in those volumes which 
afterwards charmed his country from end to end, did Gil- 
bert see his brother in so interesting a light as in these 
conversations in the bog, with only two or three noteless 
peasants for an audience." 

While Gilbert acknowledges that his brother's love- 
makings were at this time unceasing, he asserts that they 
were "governed by the strictest rules of virtue and mod- 
esty, from which he never deviated till he reached his 
twenty-third year." Tt was towards the close of his twen- 
ty-second that there occurs the record of his first serious 
B 



12 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

desire to marry and settle in life. He had set his affec- 
tions on a young woman named Ellison Begbie, daughter 
of a small farmer, and at that time servant in a family on 
Cessnock Water, about two miles from Lochlea. She is 
said to have been not a beauty, but of unusual liveliness 
and grace of mind. Long afterwards, when he had seen 
much of the world, Burns spoke of this young woman as, 
of all those on whom he ever fixed his fickle affections, the 
one most likely to have made a pleasant partner for life. 
Four letters which he wrote to her are preserved, in which 
he expresses the most pure and honourable feelings in lan- 
guage which, if a little formal, is, for manliness and sim- 
plicity, a striking contrast to the bombast of some of his 
later epistles. Songs, too, he addressed to her — The Lass 
of Cessnock Banks, Bonnie Peggy Alison, and Mary Mori- 
son. The two former are inconsiderable ; the latter is one 
of those pure and beautiful love-lyrics, in the manner of 
the old ballads, which, as Hazlitt says, " take the deepest 
and most lasting hold on the mind." 

" Yestreen, when to the trembling string, 

The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha'. 
To thee my fancy took its wing, 

I sat, but neither heard nor saw : 
Tho' this was fair, and that was braw. 

And yon the toast of a' the town, 
I sigh'd, and said amang them a', 

' Ye are na Mary Morison,' " 

" Oh, Mary, canst thou wreck his peace, 

Wha for thy sake wad gladly die; 
Or canst thou break that heart of his, 

Whase only faut is loving thee ? 
If love for love thou wilt na gie, 

At least be pity to me shown ; 



i] YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 13 

A thought ungentle canna be 
The thought o' Mary Morison." 

In these lines the lyric genius of Burns was for the first 
time undeniably revealed. 

But neither letters nor love -songs prevailed. The 
young woman, for some reason untold, was deaf to his 
entreaties ; and the rejection of this his best affection fell 
on him with a malign influence, just as he was setting his 
face to learn a trade which he hoped would enable him to 
maintain a wife. 

Irvine was at that time a centre of the flax-dressing art, 
and as Robert and his brother raised flax on their farm, 
they hoped that if they could dress as well as grow flax, 
they might thereby double their profits. As he met with 
this heavy disappointment in love just as he was setting 
out for Irvine, he went thither down-hearted and depress- 
ed, at Midsummer, 1781. All who met him at that time 
were struck with his look of melancholy, and his mood)'' 
silence, from which he roused himself only when in pleas- 
ant female society, or when he- met with men of intelli- 
gence. But the persons of this sort whom he met in Ir- 
vine were probably few. More numerous were the smug- 
glers and rough-living adventurers with which that seaport 
town, as Kirkoswald, sw^armed. Among these he con- 
tracted, says Gilbert, " some acquaintance of a freer man- 
ner of thinking and living than he had been used to, 
whose society prepared him for ov^erleaping the bonds of 
rigid virtue which had hitherto restrained him." One 
companion, a sailor-lad of wild life and loose and irregu- 
lar habits, had a wonderful fascination for Burns, who ad- 
mired him for what he thought his independence and 
magnanimity. " He was," says Burns, " the only man I 
ever knew who was a greater fool than myself, where 



14 HUBERT BURNS. [aiAr. 

woman was the presiding star; but he spoke of lawless 
love with levity, which hitherto I had regarded with hor- 
ror. Here his friendship did me a mischief y 

Another companion, older than himself, thinking that 
the religious views of Burns we^e too rigid and uncompro- 
mising, induced him to adopt "liTore liberal opinions," 
which in this case, as in so many others, meant more lax 
opinions. AVith his principles of belief, and his rules of 
conduct at once assailed and undermined, what chart or 
compass remained any more for a passionate being like 
Burns over the passion - swept sea of life that lay before 
him ? The migration to Irvine was to him the descent to 
Avernus, from which he never afterwards, in the actual 
conduct of life, however often in his hours of inspiration, 
escaped to breathe again the pure upper air. This brief 
but disastrous Irvine sojourn was brought to a sudden 
close. Burns was robbed by his partner in trade, his flax- 
dressing shop was burnt to the ground by fire during the 
carousal of a New -Year's morning, and himself, impaired 
in purse, in spirits, and in character, returned to Lochlea 
to find misfortunes thickening round his family, and his 
father on his death-bed. For the old man, his long strug- 
gle with scanty means, barren soil, and bad seasons, was 
now near its close. Consumption had set in. Early in 
1784, when his last hour drew on, the father said that 
there was one of his children of whose future he could not 
think without fear. Robert, who was in the room, came 
up to his bedside and asked, " O father, is it me you 
mean f The old man said it was. Robert turned to the 
window, with tears streaming down his cheeks, and his 
bosom swelling, from the restraint he put on himself, al- 
most to bursting. The father had early perceived the gen- 
ius that was in his boy, and even in Mount Oliphant days 



I.] YOFTII IX AYRSHIRE. 15 

had said to his .wife, *' Whoever Hves to see it, something 
extraordinary will come from that boy/' He had lived to 
see and admire his son's earliest poetic efforts. Bathe 
liad also noted the strong- passions, with the weak will, 
which might drive him on the shoals of life. 

MossGiEL. — Towards the close of 1783, Robert and his 
brother, seeing clearly the crash of family 'affairs which 
was impending, had taken on their own account a lease of 
the small farm of Mossgiel, about two or three miles dis- 
tant from Lochlea, in the parish of Mauchline. When 
their father died in February, 17S4, it was only by claim- 
ing the arrears of wages due to them, and ranking among 
their father's creditors, that they saved enough from the 
domestic wreck to stock their new farm. Thither they 
conveyed their widowed mother, and their younger broth- 
ers and sisters, in. March, 1784. Their new home was a 
bare, upland farm, 118 acres of cold clay soil, lying within 
a mile of Mauchline village. Burns entered on it with a 
firm resolution to be prudent, industrious, and thrifty. In 
his own words, " I read farming books, I calculated crops, 
I attended markets, and, in short, in spite of the devil, the 
world, and the flesh, I should have been a wise man ; but 
the first year, from unfortunately buying bad seed — the 
second, from a late harvest, we lost half our crops. This 
overset all my wisdom, and I returned like the dog to his 
vomit, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in 
the mire." Burns was in the beginning of his twenty- 
sixth year when he took up his abode at Mossgiel, where 
he remained for four years. Three things those years and 
that bare moorland farm witnessed — the wreck of his 
hopes as a farmer, the revelation of his genius as a poet, 
and the frailty of his character as a man. The result of 
the immoral habits and "liberal opinions" which he had 



16 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

learnt at Irvine were soon apparent in that event of which 
he speaks in his Epistle to John Rankine with such unbe- 
coming levity. In the Chronological Edition of his works 
it is painful to read on one page the pathetic lines which 
he engraved on his father's headstone, and a few pages on, 
written almost at the same time, the epistle above alluded 
to, and other poems in the same strain, in which the de- 
fiant poet glories in his shame. It was well for the old 
man that he was laid in Alloway Kirkyard before these 
things befell. But the widowed mother had to bear the 
burden, and to receive in her home and bring up the child 
that should not have been born. When silence and shame 
would have most become him, Burns poured forth his feel- 
ings in ribald verses, and bitterly satirized the parish min- 
ister, who required him to undergo that public penance 
which the discipline of the Church at that time exacted. 
Whether this was a wise discipline or not, no blame at- 
tached to the minister, who merely carried out the rules 
which his Church enjoined. It was no proof of magna- 
Bimity in Burns to use his talent in reviling the minister, 
who had done nothing more than his duty. One can 
hardly doubt but that in his inmost heart he must have 
been visited with other and more penitential feelings than 
those unseemly verses express. But, as Lockhart has well 
observed, " his false pride recoiled from letting his jovial 
associates know how little he was able to drown the whis- 
pers of the still small voice ; and the fermenting bitterness 
of a mind ill at ease within himself escaped — as may be 
often traced in the history of satirists — in angry sarcasms 
against those who, whatever their private errors might be, 
had at least done him no wrong." Mr. Carlyle's comment 
on this crisis of his life is too weighty to be omitted here. 
" With principles assailed by evil example from without, 



I.] YOUTH IX AYRSHIRE. 1-7 

by * passions raging like demons ' from within, he had lit- 
tle need of sceptical misgivings to whisper treason in the 
heat of the battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were al- 
ready defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence; his 
mind is at variance with itself; the old divinity no longer 
presides there ; but wild Desires and wild Repentance al- 
ternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has committed 
himself before the world ; his character for sobriety, dear 
to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted worldlings can even 
conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men ; and his only 
refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and 
is but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation gathers 
over him, broken only by the red lightnings of remorse." 
Amid this trouble it was but a poor vanity and misera- 
ble love of notoriety which could console itself with the 

thought — 

*' The mair they talk, I'm kent the better, 
E'en let them clash." 

Or was this not vanity at all, but the bitter irony of self- 
reproach ? 

This collision with the minister and Kirk Session of his 
parish, and the bitter feelings it engendered in his rebellious 
bosom, at once launched Burns into the troubled sea of re- 
ligious controversy that was at that time raging all around 
him. The clergy of the West were divided into two par- 
ties, known as the Auld Lights and the New Lights. Ayr- 
shire and the west of Scotland had long been the strong- 
hold of Presbyterianism and of the Covenanting spirit; 
and in Burns's day — a century and a half after the Cove- 
nant — a large number of the ministers still adhered to its 
principles, and preached the Puritan theology undiluted. 
These men were democratic in their ecclesiastical views, 
and stout protesters against Patronage, which has always 



18 ROBERT BURNS. [ciiAr. 

been the bugbear of the sects in Scotland. As Burns ex- 
presses it, they did their best to stir up their flocks to 

" Join their counsel and their skills 
To cowe the lairds, 
An' get the brutes the power therasels 
To chuse their herds." 

All Burns's instincts would naturally have been on the 
side of those who wished to resist patronage and " to cowe 
the lairds," had not this his natural tendency been coun- 
teracted by a stronger bias drawing him in an opposite 
direction. The Auld Lights, though democrats in Church 
politics, were the upholders of that strict Church discipline 
under which he was smarting, and to this party belonged 
his own minister, who had brought that discipline to bear 
upon him. Burns, therefore, naturally threw himself into 
the arms of the opposite, or New Light party, who were 
more easy in their life and in their doctrine. This large 
and growing section of ministers were deeply imbued with 
rationalism, or, as they then called it, " common-sense," in 
the light of which they pared away from religion all that 
was mysterious and supernatural. Some of them were 
said to be Socinians or even pure Deists, most of them 
shone less in the pulpit than at the festive board. With 
such men a person in Burns's then state of mind would 
readily sympathize, and they received him with open arms. 
Nothing could have been more unfortunate than that in 
this crisis of his career he should have fallen into intimacy 
with those hard-headed but coarse -minded men. They 
were the first persons of any pretensions to scholarly ed- 
ucation with whom he had mingled freely. He amused 
them with the sallies of his wit and sarcasm, and astonish- 
ed them by his keon insight and vigorous powers of rea- 



i] YOUTH L\ AYRSHIRE, 19 

soiling. They abetted those very tendencies in his nat- 
ure which required to be checke'd. Their countenance, as 
clergymen, would allay the scruples and misgivings he 
might otherwise have felt, and stimulate to still wilder 
recklessness whatever profanity he might be tempted to 
indulge in. When he had let loose his first shafts of sat- 
ire against their stricter brethren, those New Light minis- 
ters heartily applauded him ; and hounded him on to still 
more daring assaults. He had not only his own quarrel 
with his parish minister and the stricter clergy to revenge, 
but the quarrel also of his friend and landlord, Gavin 
Hamilton, a county lawyer, who had fallen under Church 
censure for neglect of Church ordinances, and had been 
debarred from the Communion. Burns espoused Gavin's 
cause with characteristic zeal, and let fly new arrows one 
affeer another from his satirical quiver. 

The first of these satires against the orthodox ministers 
was The Twa HerdSj or the Holy Tulzie^ written on a 
quarrel between two brother clergymen. Then followed 
in quick succession Holy Willie's Prayer, The Ordination, 
and The Holy Fair. His good mother and his brother 
were pained by these performances, and remonstrated 
against them. But Burns, though he generally gave ear 
to their counsel, in this instance turned a deaf ear to it, 
and listened to other advisers. The love of exercising his 
strong powers of satire and the applause of his boon-com- 
panions, lay and clerical, prevailed over the whispers of his 
own better nature and the advice of his truest friends. 
Whatever may be urged in defence of employing satire 
to lash hypocrisy, I cannot but think that those who have 
loved most what is best in Burns's poetry must have re- 
gretted that these poems were ever written. Some have 
commended them on the ground that they have exposed 



20 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

religious pretence and Pharisaism. The good they may 
have done in this way is perhaps doubtful. But the harm 
they have done in Scotland is not doubtful, in that they 
have connected in the minds of the people so many coarse 
and even profane thoughts with objects which they had 
regarded till then with reverence. Even The Holy Fair^ 
the poem in this kind which is least offensive, turns on 
the abuses that then attended the celebration of the Holy 
Communion in rural parishes, and with great power por- 
trays those gatherings in their most mundane aspects. 
Yet, as Lockhart has well remarked, those things were 
part of the same religious system which produced the 
scenes which Burns has so beautifully described in The 
Cotter^s Saturday Night. Strange that the same mind, 
almost at the same moment, should have conceived two 
poems so different in spirit as The Cotter'' s Saturday Night 
and The Holy Fair ! 

I have dwelt thus long on these unpleasant satires that 
I may not have again to return to them. It is a more 
welcome task to turn to the other poems of the same pe- 
riod. Though Burns had entered on Mossgiel resolved to 
do his best as a farmer, he soon discovered that it was 
not in that way he was to attain success. The crops of 
1784 and 1785 both failed, and their failure seems to have 
done something to drive him in on his own internal re- 
sources. He then for the first time seems to have awa- 
kened to the conviction that his destiny was to be a poet ; 
and he forthwith set himself, with more resolution than 
he ever showed before or after, to fulfil that mission. 
Hitherto he had complained that his life had been with- 
out an aim ; now he determined that it should be so no 
longer. The dawning hope began to gladden him that 
he might take his place among the bards of Scotland. 



I.] YOUTH IX AYRSHIKE. 21 

wlio, themselves mostly unknown, have created that at- 
mosphere of minstrelsy which envelopes and glorifies their 
native country. This hope and aim is recorded in an 
entry of his commonplace book, of the probable date of 
August, 1784: 

" However I am pleased with the works of our Scotch 
poets, particularly the excellent Ramsay, and the still more 
excellent Fergusson, yet I am hurt to see other places of 
Scotland, their towns, rivers, woods, and haughs, immor- 
talized in such celebrated performances, while my dear 
native country — the ancient bailieries of Carrick, Kyle, 
and Cunningham, famous both in ancient and modern 
times for a gallant and warlike race of inhabitants — a 
country where civil, and particularly religious liberty, have 
ever found their first support, and their last asylum — a 
country, the birthplace of many famous philosophers, sol- 
diers, and statesmen, and the scene of many important 
events recorded in Scottish history, particularly a great 
many of the actions of the glorious Wallace, the saviour 
of his country — yet we have never had one Scotch poet 
of any eminence to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the 
romantic woodlands and sequestered scenes of Ayr, and 
the heathy mountainous source and winding sweep of 
Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, Tweed. This is a 
complaint I would gladly remedy ; but, alas ! I am far 
unequal to the task, both in native genius and in educa- 
tion. Obscure I am, obscure I must be, though no young 
poet nor young soldier's heart ever beat more fondly for 
fame than mine." 

Though the sentiment here expressed may seem com- 
monplace and the language hardly grammatical, yet 1,his 
extract clearly reveals the darling ambition that was now 
haunting the heart of Burns. It was the same wish 



22 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

which he expressed better in rhyme at a later day in his 
Upistle to the Gude Wife of Wauchope House. 

"E'en then, a wish, I mind its power, 
A wish that to my latest hour 

Shall strongly heave my breast. 
That I for poor Auld Scotland's sake 
Some usefu' plan or beuk could make, 

Or sing a sang at least. 
The rough burr -thistle, spreading wide 

Amang the bearded bear, 
I turn'd the weeder-elips aside. 

An' spar'd the symbol dear." 

It was about his twenty-fifth year when he first con- 
ceived the hope that he might become a national poet. 
The failure of his first two harvests, 1784 and '85, in 
Mossgiel, may well have strengthened this desire, and 
changed it into a fixed purpose. If he was not to suc- 
ceed as a farmer, might he not find success in another em- 
ployment that was much more to his mind ? 

And this longing, so deeply cherished, he had, within 
less than two years from the time that the above entry in 
his diary was written, amply fulfilled. From the autumn 
of 1784 till May, 1786, the fountains of poetry were un- 
sealed within, and flowed forth in a continuous stream. 
That period, so prolific of poetry that none like it ever 
afterwards visited him, saw the production not only of 
the satirical poems already noticed, and of another m.orc 
genial satire, Death and Dr. Hornbook, but also of those 
characteristic epistles in which he reveals so much of his 
own character, and of those other descriptive poems in 
which he so wonderfully delineates the habits of the 
Scottish peasantry. 

Within from sixteen to eighteen months were com- 



I.J YOUTH IX AYRSHIRE. 23 

posed, not only seven or eight long epistles to rhyme-com- 
posing brothers in the neighbourhood, David Sillar, John 
Lapraik, and others, but also, Halloween, To a Mouse, The 
Jolly Beggars, The Cotter'' s Saturday Night, Address to 
the Dell, The Auld Farmer s Address to his Auld Mare, 
The Vision, The Twa Dogs, The Mountain Daisy. The 
descriptive poems above named followed each other in 
rapid succession during that spring-time of liis genius, 
having been all composed, as the latest edition of his 
works shows, in a period of about six months, between 
November, 1785, and April, 1786. Perhaps there are 
none of Biirns's compositions which give the real man 
more naturally and unreservedly than his epistles. Writ- 
ten in the dialect he had learnt by his father's fireside, to 
friends in his own station, who shared his own tastes and 
feelings, they flow on in an easy stream of genial, bappy 
spirits, in which kindly humour, wit, love of the outward 
world, knowledge of men, are all beautifully intertwined 
into one strand of poetry, unlike anything else that has 
been seen before or since. The outward form of the verse 
and the style of diction are no doubt after the manner of 
his two forerunners whom he so much admired, Ramsay 
and Fergusson ; bat the play of soul and power of ex- 
pression, the natural grace with which they rise and fall, 
the vividness of every image, and transparent truthfulness 
of every sentiment, are all his own. If there is any ex- 
ception to be made to this estimate, it is in the grudge 
which here and there peeps out against those whom he 
thought greater favourites of fortune than himself and his 
correspondents. But taken as a whole, I know not any 
poetic epistles to be compared with them. They are just 
the letters in which one friend might unbosom himself to 
another without the least artifice or disii.'uise. And the 



24 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

broad Doric is so pithy, so powerful, so aptly fitted to the 
thought, that not even Horace himself has surpassed it in 
*' curious felicity." Often when harvests were failing and 
the world going against him, he found his solace in pour- 
ing forth in rhyme his feelings to some trusted friend. 
As he says in one of these same epistles — 

" Leeze me on rhyme ! it's aye a treasure, 
My chief, amaist my only pleasure, 
At hame, a-fiel', at wark, at leisure, 

The Muse, poor hizzie ! 
Tho' rough an' raploch be her measure, 

She's seldom lazy." 

Of the poems founded on the customs of the peasantry, 
I shall speak in the sequel. The garret in which all the 
poems of this period were written is thus described by 
Chambers : " The farmhouse of Mossgiel, which still ex- 
ists almost unchanged since the days of the poet, is very 
small, consisting of only two rooms, a but and a ben, as 
they are called in Scotland. Over these, reached by a 
trap stair, is a small garret, in which Robert and his 
brother used to sleep. Thither, when he had returned 
from his day's work, the poet used to retire, and seat 
himself at a small deal table, lighted by a narrow sky- 
light in the roof, to transcribe the verses which he had 
composed in the fields. His favourite time for composi- 
tion was at the plough. Long years afterwards his sister, 
Mrs. Begg, used to tell how, when her brother had gone 
forth again to field-work, she would steal up to the garret 
and search the drawer of the deal table for the verses 
which Robert had newly transcribed." 

In which of the poems of this period his genius is most 
conspicuous it might not be easy to determine. But there 
can be little question about the justice of Lockhart's re- 



I.] YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 25 

mark, that "TAe Cotter's Saturday Night is of all Burns's 
pieces the one whose exclusion from the collection would 
be mo^t injurious, if not to the genius of the poet, at 
least to the character of the man. In spite of many fee- 
ble lines, and some heavy stanzas, it appears to me that 
even his genius would suffer more in estimation by being 
contemplated in the absence of this poem, than of any 
other single poem he has left us." Certainly it is the one 
which has most endeared his name to the more thoughtful 
and earnest of his countrymen. Strange it is, not to say 
painful, to think that this poem, in which the simple and 
manly piety of his country is so finely touched, and the 
image of his own religious father so beautifully portrayed, 
should have come from the same hand which wrote nearly 
at the same time The Jolly Beggars, The Ordinfition, and 
The Holy Fair. 

During those two years at Mossgiel, from 1784 to 1786, 
when the times were hard, and the farm unproductive, 
Burns must indeed have found poetry to be, as he himself 
says, its own reward. A nature like his required some 
vent for itself, some excitement to relieve the pressure of 
dull farm drudgery, and this was at once his purest and 
noblest excitement. In two other more hazardous forms 
of excitement he was by temperament disposed to seek ref- 
uge. These were conviviality and love-making. In the 
former of these, Gilbert says that he indulged little, if at 
all, during his Mossgiel period. And this seems proved 
by his brother's assertion that during all that time Rob- 
ert's private expenditure never exceeded seven pounds a 
year. When he had dressed himself on this, and procured 
his other necessaries, the margin that remained for drink- 
ing must have been small indeed. But love-making — that 
had been with him, ever since he reached manhood, an \;.;- 



26 ROBERT BURNS. [chap, 

ceasing employment. Even in his later teens he had, as 
his earliest songs show, given himself enthusiastically to 
those nocturnal meetings, which were then and are still 
customary among the peasantry of Scotland, and which at 
the best are full of perilous temptation. But ever since 
the time when, during his Irvine sojourn, he forsook the 
paths of innocence, there is nothing in any of his love-af- 
fairs which those who prize what was best in Burns would 
not willingly forget. If here we allude to two such inci- 
dents, it is because they are too intimately bound up with 
his life to be passed over in any account of it. Gilbert 
says that while " one generally reigned paramount in Rob- 
ert's affections, he was frequently encountering other at- 
tractions, which formed so many underplots in the drama 
of his lov^e." This is only too evident in those two loves 
which most closely touched his destiny at this time. 

From the time of his settlement at Mossgiel frequent 
allusions occur in his letters and poems to flirtations with 
the belles of the neighbouring village of Mauchline. 
Among all these Jean Armour, the daughter of a respect- 
able master-mason in that village, had the chief place in 
his aifections. All through 1785 their courtship had con- 
tinued, but early in 1786 a secret and irregular marriage, 
with a written acknowledgment of it, had to be effected. 
Then followed the fathers indignation that his daughter 
should be married to so wild and worthless a man as 
Burns ; compulsion of his daughter to give up Burns, and 
to destroy the document which vouched their marriage ; 
Burns's despair driving him to the verge of insanity ; the 
letting loose by the Armours of the terrors of the law 
against him ; his skulking for a time in concealment ; his 
resoi"? to emigrate to the West Indies, and become a 
slave-'""' .'■iver. All these things were passing in the s])nMg 



i] YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 21 

raonths of 1786, and in September of the same year Jean 
Armour became the mother of twin children. 

It would be well if we might believe that the story of 
his betrothal to Highland Mary was, as Lockhart seems to 
have thought, previous to and independent of the incidents 
just mentioned. But the more recent investigations of 
Mr. Scott Douglas and Dr. Chambers have made it too 
painfully clear that it was almost at the very time when 
he was half distracted by Jean Armour's desertion of him, 
and while he was writing his broken-hearted Lament over 
her conduct, that there occurred, as an interlude, the epi- 
sode of Mary Campbell. This simple and sincere-hearted 
girl from Argyllshire was, Lockhart says, the object of by 
far the deepest passion Burns ever knew. And Lockhart 
g;ives at length the oft-told tale how, on the second Sun- 
day of May, 1*786, they met in a sequestered spot by the 
I'anks of the River Ayr, to spend one day of parting love ; 
how they stood, one on either side of a small brook, laved 
their hands in the stream, and, holding a Bible between 
them, vowed eternal fidelity to each other. They then 
parted, never again to meet. In October of the same year 
Mary came from Argyllshire, as far as Greenock, in the 
hope of meeting Burns, but she was there seized with a 
malignant fever which soon laid her in an early grave. 

The Bible, in two volumes, which Burns gave her on 
that parting day, has been recently recovered. On the 
first volume is inscribed, in Burns's hand, "And ye shall 
not swear by My Name falsely, I am the Lord. Levit. 
19th chap. 12th verse ;" and on the second volume, " Thou 
?halt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord 
thine oath. Matth. 5th chap. 33rd verse." But the names 
<?f Mary Campbell and Robert Burns, which were original- 
ly inscribed on the volumes, have been almost obliterated. 



28 EGBERT BURNS. [chap. 

It has been suggested by Mr. Scott Douglas, the most re- 
cent editor who has investigated anew tbe whole incident, 
that, *' in the whirl of excitement which soon followed that 
Sunday, Burns forgot his vow to poor Mary, and that she, 
heart-sore at his neglect, deleted the names from this touch- 
ing memorial of their secret betrothal." 

Certain it is that in the very next month, June, 1786, 
we find Burns, in writing to one of his friends about 
" poor, ill-advised, ungrateful Armour," declaring that, " to 
confess a truth between you and me, I do still love her to 
distraction after all, though I won't tell her so if I were to 
see her." And Chambers even suggests that there was still 
a third love interwoven, at this very time, in the complicated 
web of Burns's fickle affections. Burns, though he wrote 
several poems about Highland Mary, which afterwards ap- 
peared, never mentioned her name to any of his family. 
Even if there was no more in the story than what has 
been here given, no wonder that a heart like Burns, which, 
for all its unsteadfastness, never lost its sensibility, nor 
even a sense of conscience, should have been visited by 
the remorse which forms the burden of the lyric to Mary 
in heaven, written three years after. 

" Seest thou thy lover lowly laid ? 
Hear'st thou the pangs that rend his breast ?" 

The misery of his condition, about the time when High- 
land Mary died, and the conflicting feelings which agitated 
him, are depicted in the following extract from a letter 
which he wrote probably about October, 1786, to his friend 
Robert Aiken : 

" There are many things that plead strongly against it 
[seeking a place in the Excise] : the uncertainty of getting 
soon into business ; the consequences of my follies, which 



i] YOUTH IX AYRSHIRE. 29 

perhaps make it impracticable for mh to stay at home ; 
and, besides, I have been for some time pining under se- 
cret wretchedness, from causes which you pretty well know 
— the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, with 
some wandering stabs of remorse, which never fail to settle 
on my vitals like vultures when attention is not called away 
by the calls of society or the vagaries of the Muse. Even 
in the hour of social mirth, my gaiety is the madness of 
an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner. 
All these reasons urge me to go abroad, and to all these 
reasons I have only one answer — the feelings of a father. 
This, in the present mood I am in, overbalances everything 
that can be laid in the scale against it. You may perhaps 
think it an extravagant fancy, but it is a sentiment which 
strikes home to my very soul ; though sceptical in some 
points of our current belief, yet I think I have every evi- 
dence for the reality of a life beyond the stinted bourne 
of our present existence : if so, then how should I, in the 
presence of that tremendous Being, the Author of exist- 
ence, how should I meet the reproaches of those who stand 
to me in the dear relation of children, whom I deserted in 
the smiling innocency of helpless infancy ? Oh, Thou great 
unknown Power ! Thou Almighty God ! who hast lighted 
up reason in my breast, and blessed me with immortality ! 
I have frequently wandered from that order and regularity 
necessary for the perfection of Thy works, yet Thou hast 
never left me nor forsaken me. . . ." 

* * ^- * -* ■» 

" You see, sir, that if to know one's errors were a prob- 
ability of mending them, I stand a fair chance ; but, ac- 
cording to the reverend Westminster divines, though con- 
viction must precede conversion, it is very far from always 
implying it," 



ao ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

This letter exhibits the tumult of soul in which he had 
been tossed during the last six months before it was writ- 
ten. He had by his own conduct wound round himself 
complications from which he could not extricate himself, 
yet which he could not but poignantly feel. One cannot 
read of the -'wandering stabs of remorse" of which he 
speaks, without thinking of Highland Mary. 

Some months before the above letter was written, in the 
April of the same year, at the time when he first fell into 
trouble with Jean Armour and her father, Burns had re- 
solved to leave his country and sail for the West Indies. 
He agreed with a Mr. Douglas to go to Jamaica and be- 
come a book-keeper on his estate there. But how were 
funds to be got to pay his passage-money? His friend 
Gavin Hamilton suggested that the needed sum might be 
raised, if he were to publish by subscription the poems he 
had lying in his table-drawer. 

Accordingly, in April, the publication of his poems was 
resolved on. His friends, Gavin Hamilton of Mauchline, 
Aiken and Ballantyne of Ayr, Muir and Parker of Kilmar- 
nock, and otheirs — all did their best to get the subscription 
lists quickly filled. The last-named person put down his 
own name for thirty-five copies. The printing of them 
was committed to John Wilson, a printer in Kilmarnock, 
and during May, June, and July of 1786, the work of the 
press was going forward. In the interval between the res- 
olution to publish and the appearance of the poems, during 
his distraction about Jean Armour's conduct, followed by 
the episode of Highland Mary, Burns gave vent to his own 
dark feelings in some of the saddest strains that ever fell 
from him — the lines on The Mountain Daisy, The Lament, 
the Odes to Despondency and to Ruin. And yet so vari- 
ous were his moods, so versatile his powers, that it was 



I.] YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 31 

during that same interval that he composed, in a very dif- 
ferent vein, The Twa Dogs^ and probably also his satire 
of The Holy Fair. The following is the account the poet 
gives of these transactions in the autobiographical sketch 
of himself which he cdtomunicated to Dr. Moore : 

" I now began to be known in the neighbourhood as a 
maker of rhymes. The first of my poetic offspring that 
saw light was a burlesque lamentation of a quarrel between 
two reverend Calvinists ; both of them were dramatis ^er- 
sonce in my Holy Fair. I had a notion myself that the 
piece had some merit ; but to prevent the worst, I gave a 
copy of it to a friend who was fond of such things, and 
told him that I could not guess who was the author of it, 
but that I thought it pretty clever. With a certain de- 
scription of the clergy, as well as the laity, it met with a 
roar of applause. 

^^ Holy Willie'' s Prayer next made its appearance, and 
alarmed the Kirk Session so much, that they held several 
meetings to look over their spiritual artillery, if haply any 
of it might be pointed against profane rhymers. Unluck- 
ily for me, my wandering led me on another side, within 
point-biank shot of their heaviest metal. This is the rm- 
f ortunate incident which gave rise to my printed poem, The 
Lament. This was a most melancholy affair, which I can- 
not yet bear to reflect on, and had very nearly given me 
one or two of the principal qualifications for a place among 
those who have lost the chart and mistaken the reckoning 
of Rationality. 

"I gave up my part of the farm to my brother, and 
made what little preparation was in my power for Jamaica. 
But, before leaving my native country for ever, I resolved 
to publish my poems. I weighed my productions as im- 
partially as was in my power ; I thought they had merit ; 



S2 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

and it was a delicious idea that I should be called a clever 
fellow, even though it should never reach my ears — a poor 
negro-driver, or perhaps a victim to that inhospitable clime, 
and gone to the world of spirits! I can truly say, that 
pauvre inconnu as I then was, I had pretty nearly as high 
an idea of my works as I have at this moment, when the 
public has decided in their favour. . . . 

" I threw off about six hundred copies, of which T got 
subscriptions for about three hundred and fifty. My van- 
ity was highly gratified by the reception I met with from 
the public ; and besides, I pocketed, all expenses deducted, 
nearly twenty pounds. This sum came very seasonably, as 
I was thinking of indenting myself, for want of money, to 
procure a passage. As soon as I was master of nine guin- 
eas, the price of wafting me to the torrid zone, I took a 
steerage passage in the first ship that was to sail from the 

Clyde, for 

'Hungry ruin had me in the Find.' 

" I had been for some days skulking from covert to 
covert, under all the terrors of a jail, as some ill-advised 
people had uncoupled the merciless pack of the law at my 
heels. I had taken the last farewell of my friends; my 
chest was on the way to Greenock; I had composed the 
last song I should ever measure in Caledonia, ' The gloomy 
night is gathering fast, ^ when a letten from Dr. Blackwood 
to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening 
up new prospects to my poetic ambition." 

It was at the close of July, while Burns was, according 
to his own account, " wandering from one friend's house 
to another," to avoid the jail with which he was threatened 
by Jean Armour's father, that the volume appeared, con- 
taining the immortal poems (1786). That Burns himself 
had some true estimate of their real worth is shown by 



I.] YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 3J^ 

the way in which he expresses himself in his preface to 
his volume. 

Ushered in with what Lockhart calls a " modest and 
manly preface," the Kilmarnock volume went forth to the 
world. The fame of it spread at once like wild-fire through- 
out Ayrshire and the parts adjacent. This is the account 
of its reception given by Robert Heron, a young literary 
man, who was at that time living in the Stewartry of Kirk- 
cudbright : — " Old and young, high and low, grave and gay, 
learned or ignorant, were alike delighted, agitated, trans- 
ported. I was at that time resident in Galloway, contigu- 
ous to Ayrshire, and I can well remember how even plough- 
boys and maid-servants would have gladly bestowed the 
wages they earned most hardly, and which they wanted 
to purchase necessary clothing, if they might procure the 
works of Burns." The edition consisted of six hundred 
copies — three hundred and fifty had been subscribed for 
before publication, and the remainder seems to have been 
sold off in about two months from their first appearance. 
When all expenses were paid. Burns received twenty 
pounds as his share of the profits. Small as this sum 
was, it would have more than suflficed to convey him to 
the West Indies ; and, accordingly, with nine pounds of it 
he took a steerage passage in a vessel which was expected 
to sail from Greenock at the beginning of September. But 
from one cause or another the day of sailing was postponed, 
his friends began to talk of trying to get him a place in 
the Excise, his fame was rapidly widening in his own coun- 
try, and his powers were finding a response in minds su- 
perior to any which he had hitherto known. Up to this 
time he had not associated with any persons of a higher 
grade than the convivial lawyers of Mauchline and Ayr, 
and the mundane ministers of the New Light school. But 



84 ROBERT BURNS. [cha*. 

now persons of every rank were anxious to beeonie ac- 
quainted with the wonderful Ayrshire Ploughman, for it 
was by that name he now began to be known, just as in 
the next generation another poet of as humble birth was 
spoken of as The Ettrick Shepherd. The first persons of 
a higher order who sought the acquaintanceship of Burns 
were Dugald Stewart and Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop. The 
former of these two was the celebrated Scotch metaphy- 
sician, one of the chief ornaments of Edinburgh and its 
University at the close of last and the beginning of this 
century. He happened to be passing the summer at Ca- 
trine, on the Ayr, a few miles from Burns's farm, and hav- 
ing been made acquainted with the poet's works and chai - 
acter by Mr. Mackenzie, the surgeon of Manchline, he in- 
vited the poet and the medical man to dine with him at 
Catrine. The day of this meeting was the 23rd of Octo^ 
ber, only three days after that on which Highland Mary 
died. Burns met on that day not only the professor and 
his accomplished wife, but for the first time in his life 
dined with a, live lord — a young nobleman, said to have 
been of high promise. Lord Daer, eldest son of the then 
Earl of Selkirk. He had been a former pupil of Dugald 
Stewart, and happened to be at that time his guest. Burns 
has left the following humorous record of his own feelings 
at that meeting : 

" This wot ye all whom it concerns, 
I, Rhymer Robin, alias Burns, 

October twenty-third, 
A ne'er to be forgotten day, 
Sae far I sprachled up the brae [clambered], 

I dinner'd wi' a Lord. 
* * * * * *' 

"But wi' a Lord ! stand out ray shin, 
A Lord — a Peer, an Earl's Son ! 



I.J YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. dH^ 

Up higher yet my bonnet ! 
And sic a Lord ! lang Scotch ells twa, 
Our Peerage he o'erlooks them a', 

As I look o'er a sonnet. 

" But oh for Hogarth's magic power ! 
To show Sir Bardie's willyart glower [bewildered]. 

And how he stared and stammered, 
When goavan, as if led in branks [moving stupidly], 
And stumpin' on his ploughman shanks, 

He in the parlour hammered. 

** I sidling sheltered in a nook, 
An' at his Lordship steal't a look 

Like some portentous omen; 
Except good sense and social glee, 
An' (what surprised me) modesty, 
I marked nought uncommon. 

" I watched the symptoms o' the great, 
The gentle pride, the lordly state. 

The arrogant assuming ; 
The fient a pride, nae pride had he. 
Nor sauce, nor state, that I could see, 

Mair than an honest ploughman." 

From this record of that evening given by Burns, it is 
interesting to turn to the impression made on Professor 
Stewart by this their first interview. He says: 

" His manners were then, as they continued ever after- 
wards, simple, manly, and independent; strongly expres- 
sive of conscious genius and worth, but without anything 
that indicated forwardness, arrogance, or vanity. He took 
his share in conversation, but not more than belonged to 
him ; and listened with apparent attention and deference 
on subjects where his want of education deprived him of 
the means of information. . If there had been a little more 
of gentleness and accommodation in his temper, he would, 



8r» ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

I think, have been still more interesting ; but he had been 
accustomed to give law in the circle of his ordinary ac- 
quaintance, and his dread of anything approaching to 
meanness or servility rendered his manner somewhat de- 
cided and hard. Nothing, perhaps, was more remarkable 
among his various attainments than the fluency, and pre- 
cision, and originality of his language, when he spoke in 
company ; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his 
turn of expression, and avoided, more successfully than 
most Scotchmen, the peculiarities of Scottish phraseology." 

Burns parted with Dugald Stewart, after this evening 
spent with him in Ayrshire, to meet him again in the 
Edinburgh coteries, amid which the professor shone as a 
chief light. 

Not less important in the history of Burns was his first 
introduction to Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop, a lady who con- 
tinued the constant friend of himself and of his family 
while she lived. She was said to be a lineal descendant 
of the brother of the great hero of Scotland, William Wal- 
lace. Gilbert Burns gives the following account of the 
way in which his brother's acquaintance with this lady 
began : 

" Of all the friendships, which Robert acquired in Ayr- 
shire or elsewhere, none seemed more agreeable to him 
than that of Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop, nor any which has 
been more uniformly and constantly exerted in behalf of 
him and his family, of which, were it proper, I could give 
many instances. Robert was on the point of setting out 
for Edinburgh before Mrs. Dunlop heard of him. About 
the time of my brother's publishing in Kilmarnock, she 
had been afflicted with a long and severe illness, which had 
reduced her mind to the most distressing state of depres- 
sion. In this situation, a copy of the printed poems was 



I.] YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 87 

laid on her table by a friend; and happening to open on 
The Cotter^s Saturday Night, she read it over with the 
greatest pleasure and surprise ; the poet's description of 
the simple cottagers operating on her mind like the charm 
of a powerful exorcist, expelling the demon ennui, and re- 
storing her to her wonted inward harmony and satisfac- 
tion. Mrs. Dunlop sent off a person express to Mossgiel, 
distant fifteen or sixteen miles, with a very obliging letter 
to my brother, desiring him to send her half a dozen cop- 
ies of his poems, if he had them to spare, and begging he 
would do her the pleasure of calling at Dunlop House as 
soon as convenient. This was the beginning of a corre- 
spondence which ended only with the poet's life. Nearly 
the last use he made with his pen was writing a short let- 
ter to this lady a few days before his death." 

The success of the first edition of his poems naturally 
made Burns anxious to see a second edition begun. He 
applied to his Kilmarnock printer, who refused the vent- 
ure, unless Burns could supply ready money to pay for 
the printing. This he could not do. But the poems by 
this time had been read and admired by the most culti- 
vated men in Edinburgh, and more than one word of en- 
couragement had reached him from that city. The earli- 
est of these was contained in a letter from the blind poet, 
Dr. Blacklock, to whom Mr. Laurie, the kindly and accom- 
plished minister of Loudoun, had sent the volume. This 
Mr. Laurie belonged to the more cultivated section of the 
Moderate party in the Church, as it was called, and was 
the friend of Dr. Hugh Blair, Principal Robertson, and 
Dr. Blacklock, and had been the channel through which 
Macpherson's fragments of Ossian had first been brought 
under the notice of that literary circle, which afterwards 
introduced them to the world. The same worthy minister 



38 ROBERT BURNS. [chak 

had, on the first appearance of the poems, made Burns'iS 
acquaintance, and had received him with warm-hearted 
hospitality. This kindness the poet acknowledged, on one 
of his visits to the Manse of Loudoun, by leaving in the 
room in which he slept a short poem of six very feeling 
stanzas, which contained a prayer for the family. This is 
the last stanza — 

*' When soon or late they reach that coast, 
O'er life's rough ocean driven, 
May they rejoice, no wanderer lost, 
A family in heaven !" 

As soon as Mr. Laurie received the letter from Dr. Black- 
lock, written on the 4th September, in which warm admi- 
ration of the Kilmarnock volume was expressed, he for - 
warded it to Burns at Mossgiel. The result of it fell like 
sunshine on the young poet's heart ; for, as he says, " The 
doctor belonged to a set of critics for whose applause I 
had not dared to hope." The next word of approval from 
Edinburgh was a highly appreciative criticism of the po- 
ems, which appeared in a number of The Edinburgh Mag- 
azine at the beginning of November. Up till this time 
Burns had not abandoned his resolution to emigrate to the 
West Indies. But the refusal of the Kilmarnock printer 
to undertake a new edition, and the voices of encourage- 
ment reaching him from Edinburgh, combining with his 
natural desire to remain, and be known as a poet, in his 
native country, at length made him abandon the thought 
of exile. On the 18th November we find him wTiting to 
a friend, that he had determined on Monday or Tuesday, 
the 27th or 28th November, to set his face toward the 
Scottish capital and try his fortune there. 

At this stage of the poet's career. Chambers pauses to 
speculate on the feelings with which the humble family at 



I.] YOUTH LN AYRSHIRE. 89 

Mossgiel would hear of the sudden blaze of their broth- 
er's fame, and of the change it had made in his prospects. 
They rejoiced, no doubt, that he was thus rescued from 
compulsory banishment, and were no way surprised that 
the powers they had long known him to possess had at 
length won the world's admiration. If he had fallen into 
evil courses, none knew it so well as they, and none had 
suffered more by these aberrations. Still, with all his faults, 
he had always been to them a kind son and brother, not 
loved the less for the anxieties he had caused them. But 
the pride and satisfaction they felt in his newly-won fame 
would be deep, not demonstrative. For the Burns family 
were a shy, reserved race, and like so many of the Scottish 
peasantry, the more they felt, the less they would express. 
In this they were very unlike the poet, with whom to have 
a feeling and to express it were almost synonymous. His 
mother, though not lacking in admiration of her son, is 
said to have been chiefly concerned lest the praises of his 
genius should make him forget the Giver of it. Such may 
have been the feelings of the poet's family. 

What may we imagine his own feeling to have been in 
this crisis of his fate ? The thought of Edinburgh society 
would naturally stir that ambition which was strong with- 
in him, and awaken a desire to meet the men who were 
praising him in the capital, and to try his powers in that 
wider arena. It might be that in that new scene some- 
thing might occur which would reverse the current of his 
fortunes, and set him free from the crushing poverty that 
had hitherto kept him down. Anyhow, he was conscious 
of strong powers, which fitted him to shine, not in poetry 
only, but in conversation and discussion ; and, ploughman 
though he was, he did not shrink from encountering any 
man or any set of men. Proud, too, we know he was, and 



40 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

his pride often showed itself in jealousy and suspicion of 
the classes who were socially above him, until such feel- 
ings were melted by kindly intercourse with some individ- 
ual man belonging to the suspected orders. He felt him- 
self to surpass in natural powers those who were his supe- 
riors in rank and fortune, and he could not, for the life 
of him, see why they should be full of this world's goods, 
while he had none of them. He had not yet learned — he 
never did learn — that lesson, that the genius he had re- 
ceived was his allotted and sufficient portion, and that his 
wisdom lay in making the most of this rare inward gift, 
even on a meagre allowance of the world's external goods. 
But perhaps, whether he knew it or not, the greatest at- 
traction of the capital was the secret hope that in that 
new excitement he might escape from the demons of re- 
morse and despair which had for many months been dog- 
ging him. He may have fancied this, but the pangs which 
Burns had created for himself were too deep to be in this 
way permanently put by. 

The secret of his settled unhappiness lay in the affec- 
tions that he had abused in himself and in others who had 
trusted him. The course he had run since his Irvine so- 
journ was not of a kind to give peace to him or to any ' 
man. A coarse man of the world might have stifled the 
tender voices that were reproaching him, and have gone on 
his way uncaring that his conduct — 

" Hardened a' within, 
And petrified the feeling."- 

But Burns could not do this. The heart that had respond- 
ed so feelingly to the sufferings of lower creatures, the 
unhoused mouse, the shivering cattle, the wounded hare, 
could not without . shame remember the wrono-.s he had 



i] YOUTH L\ AYRSHIRE. 41 

done to those human beings whose chief fault was that 
they had trusted him not wisely but too well. And these 
suggestions of a sensitive heart, conscience was at hand 
to enforce — a conscience wonderfully clear to discern the 
right, even when the will was least able to fulfil it. The 
excitements of a great city, and the loud praises of his 
fellow-men, might enable him momentarily to forget, but 
could not permanently stifle inward voices like these. So 
it was with a heart but ill at ease, bearing dark secrets he 
could tell to no one, that Burns passed from his Ayrshire 
cottage into the applause of the Scottish capital. 

S 



CHAPTER II. 

FIRST WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 

The journey of Burns from Mossgiel to Edinburgh was 
a sort of triumphal progress. He rode on a pony, lent 
him by a friend, and as the journey took two days, his 
resting-place the first night was at the farm-house of Cov- 
ington Mains, in Lanarkshire, hard by the Clyde. The 
tenant of this farm, Mr. Prentice, was an enthusiastic ad- 
wiirer of Burns's poems, and had subscribed for twenty 
'C?opies of the second edition. His son, years afterwards, 
in a letter to Christopher North, thus describes the even- 
ing on which Burns appeared at his father's farm : — "All 
the farmers in the parish had read the poet's then pub- 
lished works, and were anxious to see him. They were 
all asked to meet him at a late dinner, and the signal of 
his arrival was to be a white sheet attached to a pitchfork, 
and put on the top of a corn-stack in the barn-yard. The 
parish is a beautiful amphitheatre, with the Clyde winding 
through it — Well brae Hill to the west, Tinto Hill and the 
Culter Fells to the south, and the pretty, green, conical 
hill, Quothquan Law, to the east. My father's stack-yard, 
lying in the centre, was seen from every house in the par- 
ish. At length Burns arrived, mounted on a borrowed 
pownie. Instantly was the white flag hoisted, and as in- 
stantly were seen the farmers issuing from their houses, 
-md converging to the point of meeting. A glorious even- 



CHAP. II.] FIKST WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 43 

Jng, or rather night, which borrowed something from the 
morning, followed, and the conversation of the poet con- 
firmed and increased the admiration created by his writ- 
ings. On the following morning he breakfasted with a 
large party at the next farm - house, tenanted by James 
Stodart ; . . . took lunch with a large party at the bank in 
Carnwath, and rode into Edinburgh that evening on the 
pownie, which he returned to the owner in a few days 
afterwards by John Samson, the brother of the immortal 
Tamr 

This is but a sample of the kind of receptions which 
were henceforth to await Burns wherever his coming was 
known. If such welcome* were pleasing to his ambition, 
they must have been trying both to his bodily and his 
mental health. 

Burns reached Edinburgh on the 28th of November, 
1786. The one man of note there with whom he had any 
acquaintance was Professor Dugald Stewart, whom, as al- 
ready mentioned, he had met in Ayrshire. But it was not 
to him or to any one of his reputation that he first turned ; 
but he sought refuge with John Richmond, an old Mauch- 
line acquaintance, who was humbly lodged in Baxter's 
Close, Lawnmarket. During the whole of his first winter 
in Edinburgh, Burns lived in the lodging of this poor lad, 
and shared with him his single room and bed, for which 
they paid three shillings a week. It was from this retreat 
that Burns was afterwards to go forth into the best so- 
ciety of the Scottish capital, and thither, after these brief 
hospitalities were over, he had to return. For some days 
after his .arrival in town, he called on no one — letters of 
introduction he had none to deliver. But he is said to 
have wandered about alone, " looking down from Arthur's 
Seat, surveying the palace, gazing at the Castle, or looking 



44 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

into the windows of the booksellers' shops, where he saw 
all books of the day, save the poems of the Ayrshire 
Ploughman." He found his way to the lowly grave of 
Fergusson, and, kneeling down, kissed the sod ; he sought 
out the house of Allan Ramsay, and, on entering it, took 
off his hat. While Burns is thus employed, we may cast 
a glance at the capital to which he had come, and the so- 
ciety he was about to enter. 

Edinburgh at that time was still adorned by a large 
number of the stars of literature, which, although none of 
those then living may have reached the first magnitude, 
had together made a galaxy in the northern heavens, from 
the middle till the close of last century. At that time lit- 
erature was well represented in the University. The Head 
of it was Dr. Robertson, well known as the historian of 
Charles V., and as the author of other historic works. 
The chair of Belles-Lettres was filled by the accomplished 
Dr. Hugh Blair, whose lectures remain one of the best 
samples of the correct and elegant, but narrow and frigid 
style, both of sentiment and criticism, which then flourish- 
ed throughout Europe, and nowhere more than in Edin- 
burgh. Another still greater ornament of the University 
was Dugald Stewart, the Professor of Moral Philosophy, 
whose works, if they have often been surpassed in depth 
and originality of speculation, have seldom been equalled 
for solid sense and polished ease of diction. The profess- 
ors at that time were most of them either taken from the 
ranks of the clergy, or closely connected with them. 

Among the literary men unconnected with the Univer- 
sity, by far the greatest name, that of David Hume, had 
disappeared about ten years before Burns arrived in the 
capital. But his friend. Dr. Adam Smith, author of The 
Wealth of Nations^ ^\a\\ lingered. Mr. Henry Mackenzie, 



ii.J FIRST WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 45 

" The Man of Feeling," as lie was called from his best 
known work, was at that time one of the most polished 
as well as popular writers in Scotland. He was then con- 
ducting a periodical called the Lounger^ which was ac- 
knowledged as the highest tribunal of criticism in Scot- 
land, and was not unknown beyond it. 

But even more influential than the literary lights of 
the University were the magnates of the Bench and Bar. 
During the eighteenth century and the earlier part of the 
nineteenth, the Scottish Bar was recruited almost entirely 
from the younger sons of ancient Scottish families. To 
the patrician feelings which they brought with them from 
their homes these men added that exclusiveness which 
clings to a profession claiming for itself the highest place 
in the city where they resided. Modern democracy has 
made rude inroads on what was formerly something of a 
select patrician caste. But the profession of the Bar has 
never wanted either then or in more recent times some 
genial and original spirits who broke through the crust 
of exclusiveness. Such, at the time of Burns's advent, 
was Lord Monboddo, the speculative and humorous judge, 
who in his own way anticipated the theory of man's de- 
scent from the monkey. Such, too, was the genial and 
graceful Henry Erskine, the brother of the Lord Chancel- 
lor of that name, the pride and the favourite of his pro- 
fession — the sparkling and ready wit who, thirteen years 
before the day of Burns, had met the rude manners of 
Dr. Johnson with a well-known repartee. When the 
Doctor visited the Parliament House, Erskine was pre- 
sented to him by Boswell, and was somewhat gruffly re- 
ceived. After having made his bow, Erskine slipped a 
shilling into Boswell's hand, whispering that it was for the 
sio-ht of his hear! 



46 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

Besides these two classes, the occupants of the Profes- 
sorial chair and of the Bar, there still gathered every 
winter in Edinburgh a fair sprinkling of rank and beauty, 
which had not yet abandoned the Scottish for the Eng- 
lish capital. The leader at that time in gay society w^as 
the well-known Duchess of Gordon — a character so re- 
markable in her day that some rumour of her still lives 
in Scottish memory. The impression made upon her by 
Burns and his conversation shall afterwards be noticed. 

Though Burns for the first day or two after his arrival 
wandered about companionless, he was not left long un- 
friended. Mr. Dalrymple, of Orangefield, an Ayrshire 
country gentleman, a warm-hearted man, and a zealous 
Freemason, who had become acquainted with Burns dur- 
ing the previous summer, now introduced tlie Ayrshire 
bard to his relative, the Earl of Glencairn. This noble- 
man, who had heard of Burns from his Ayrshire factor, 
welcomed him in a very friendly spirit, introduced him to 
his connexion, Henry Erskine, and also recommended him 
to the good offices of Creech, at that time the first pub- 
lisher in Edinburgh. Of Lord Glencairn, Chambers says 
that " his personal beauty formed the index to one of the 
fairest characters." As long as he lived he did his ut- 
most to befriend Burns, and on his death, a few years after 
this time, the poet, who seldom praised the great unless 
he respected and loved them, composed one of his most 
pathetic elegies. 

It was not, however, to his few Ayrshire connexions 
only, Mr. Dalrymple, Dugald Stewart, and others, that 
Burns Avas indebted for his introduction to Edinburgh 
society. His own fame was now enough to secure it. A 
criticism of his poems, which appeared within a fortnight 
after his arrival in Edinburgh, in the Loun(jei\ on the 



n.] FIRST WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 47 

9tli of iJoceiiiber, did much to increase his reputation. 
The author of that criticism was The Man of Feeling, and 
to him belongs the credit of having been the first to claim 
that Burns should be recognized as a great original poet, 
not relatively only, in consideration of the difficulties he 
had to struggle with, but absolutely on the ground of the 
intrinsic excellence of his work. He pointed to his power 
of delineating manners, of painting the passions, and of 
describing scenery, as all bearing the stamp of true genius ; 
he called on his countrymen to recognize that a great na- 
tional poet had arisen amongst them, and to appreciate 
the gift that in him had been bestowed upon their genera- 
tion. Alluding to his narrow escape from exile, he ex- 
horted them to retain and to cherish this inestimable gift 
of a native poet, and to repair, as far as possible, the 
wrongs which suffering or neglect had inflicted on him. 
The Lounger had at that time a wide circulation in Scot- 
land, and penetrated even to England. It was known and 
read by the poet Cowper, who, whether from this or some 
other source, became acquainted with the poems of Burns 
within the first year of their publication. In July, 1787, 
we find the poet of The Task telling a correspondent that 
he had read Burns's poems twice ; " and though they be 
written in a language that is new to me ... I think 
them, on the whole, a very extraordinary production. He 
is, I believe, the only poet these kingdoms have produced 
in the lower rank of life since Shakespeare (I should rather 
say since Prior), who need not be indebted for any part 
of his praise to a charitable consideration of his origin, 
and the disadvantages under which he has laboured." 
Cowper thus endorses the verdict of Mackenzie in almost 
the same language. 

It did not, however, require such testimonials, from here 



48 ROBERT BURXS. , [chap. 

and there a literary man, however eminent, to open every 
hospitable door in Edinburgh to Burns. Within a month 
after liis arrival in town he had been welcomed at the 
tables of all the celebrities — Lord Monboddo, Robertson, 
the historian, Dr. Hugh Blair, Dugald Stew^art, Dr. Adam 
Ferguson, The Man of Feeling, Mr. Fraser Tytler, and 
many others. We are surprised to find that he had been 
nearly two months in town before he called on the amiable 
Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet, who in his well-known letter 
to Dr. Laurie had been the first Edinburgh autliority to 
hail in Burns the rising of a new star. 

How he bore himself throughout that winter when he 
was the chief lion of Edinburgh society many records 
remain to show, both in his own letters and in the reports 
of those who met him. On the whole, his native good 
sense carried him well through the ordeal. If he showed 
for the most part due respect to others, he was still more 
bent on maintaining his respect for himself ; indeed, this 
latter feeling was pushed even to an exaggerated inde- 
pendence. As Mr. Lockhart has expressed it, he showed, 
"in the whole strain of his bearing, his belief that in the 
society of the most eminent men of his nation he was 
where he was entitled to be, hardly deigning to flatter 
them by exhibiting a symptom of being flattered." All 
who heard him were astonished by his wonderful powers 
of conversation. These impressed them, they said, with a 
greater sense of his genius than even his finest poems. 

With the ablest men that he met he held his own in 
argument, astonishing all listeners by the strength of his 
judgment, and the keenness of his insight both into men 
and things. And when he warmed on subjects which 
interested him, the boldest stood amazed at the flashes of 
liis wit, and the vehement flow of his impassioned elo- 



IT.] FIRST WINTER IK EDINBURGH. 49 

quence. With the " high-born ladies " he succeeded even 
better than with the " stately patricians" — as one of those 
dames herself expressed it, fairly carrying them off their 
feet by the deference of his manner, and the mingled 
humour and pathos of his talk. 

It is interesting to know in what dress Burns generally 
appeared in Edinburgh. Soon after coming thither he is 
said to have laid aside his country clothes for " a suit of 
blue and buff, the livery of Mr. Fox, w ith buckskins and 
top-boots." How he wore his hair will be seen imme- 
diately. There are several well-known descriptions of 
Burns's manner and appearance during his Edinburgh so- 
journ, which, often as they have been cflioted, cannot be 
passed by in any account of his life. 

Mr. Walker, who met him for the first time at break- 
fast in the house of Dr. Blacklock, says, " 1 was not much 
struck by his first appearance. His person, though strong 
and well-knit, and much superior to what might be expect- 
ed in a ploughman, appeared to be only of the middle size, 
but was rather above it. His motions were firm and de- 
cided, and, though without grace, were at the same time 
so free from clownish constraint as to show that he had 
not always been confined to the society of his profes- 
sion. His countenance was not of that elegant cast which 
is most frequent among the upper ranks, but it was manly 
and intelligent, and marked by a thoughtful gravity which 
shaded at times into sternness. In his large dark eye 
the most striking index of his genius resided. It was full 
of mind. . . . He was plainly but properly dressed, in a. 
style midway between the holiday costume of a farmer 
and that of the company with which he now associated. 
His black hair without powder, at a time when it was 
generally worn, was tied behind, and spread upon his fore- 
st 



r.O ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

head. Had 1 met him near a seaport, I should have con- 
jectured him to be the master of a merchant vessel. . . . 
In no part of his manner was there the slightest affecta- 
tion ; nor could a stranger have suspected, from anything 
in his behaviour or conversation, that he had been for some 
months the favourite of all the fashionable circles of the 
metropolis. In conversation he was powerful. His con- 
ceptions and expressions were of corresponding vigour, 
and on all subjects were as remote as possible from com- 
monplaces. Though somewhat authoritative, it was in a 
way which gave little offence, and was readily imputed to 
his inexperience in those modes of smoothing dissent and 
softening assertion, which are important characteristics of 
polished manners. 

" The day after my first introduction to Burns, I supped 
with him at Dr. Blair's. The other guests were few, and 
as they had come to meet Burns, the Doctor endeavoured 
to draw him out, and to make him the central figure of 
the group. Though he therefore furnished the greatest 
proportion of the conversation, he did no more than what 
he saw evidenth^ was expected. From the blunders often 
committed by men of genius Burns was unusually free ; 
yet on the present occasion he made a more awkward slip 
than any that are reported of the poets or mathematicians 
most noted for absence of mind. Being asked from which 
of the public places he had received the greatest gratifica- 
tion, he named the High Church, but gave the preference 
as a preacher to the colleague of our worthy entertainer, 
whose celebrity rested on his pulpit eloquence, in a tone so 
pointed and decisive as to throw the whole company into 
the most foolish embarrassment!" Dr. Blair, we are told, 
relieved their confusion by seconding Burns's praise. The 
poet saw his mistake, but had tlie good sense not to try t»^ 



II.] FIRST WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 51 

repair it. Years afterwards he told Professor Walker that 
he had never spoken of this unfortunate blunder, so pain- 
ful to him had the remembrance of it been. 

There seems little doubt, from all the accounts that have 
been preserved, that Burns in conversation gave forth his 
opinions with more decision than politeness. He had not 
a little of that mistaken pride not uncommon among his 
countrymen, which fancies that gentle manners and con- 
sideration for others' feelings are marks of servility. He 
was for ever harping on independence, and this betrayed 
him into some acts of rudeness in society which have been 
recorded with perhaps too great minuteness. 

Against these remarks, we must set the testimony of 
Dugald Stewart, who says : " The attentions he received 
from all ranks and descriptions of persons would have turn- 
ed any head but his own. I cannot say that I perceived 
any unfavourable effect which they left on his mind. He 
retained the same simplicity which had struck me so forci- 
bly when first I saw him in the country, nor did he seem 
to feel any additional self-importance from the number 
and rank of his new acquaintance. He walked with me 
in spring, early in the morning, to the Braid Hills, when 
he charmed me still more by his private conversation than 
he had ever done in company. He was passionately fond 
of the beauties of nature ; and he once told me, when I 
was admiring a distant prospect in one of our morning 
walks, that the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a 
pleasure to his mind which none could understand who 
had not witnessed, like himself, the happiness and worth 
w^hich they contained. . . . The idea which his conver- 
sation conveyed of the powers of his mind exceeded, if 
possible, that which is suggested by his writings. All his 
faculties were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous. 



52 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of his 
own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius 
exclusively adapted to that species of composition. I 
should have pronounced him fitted to excel in whatever 
walk of ambition he had chosen. . . . The remarks he 
made on the characters of men were shrewd and pointed, 
though frequently inclining too much to sarcasm. His 
praise of those he loved was sometimes indiscriminate and 
extravagant. . . . His wit was ready, and always impressed 
with the marks of a vigorous understanding ; but, to my 
taste, not often pleasing or happy." 

While the learned of his own day were measuring him 
thus coolly, and forming their critical estimates of him, 
youths of the younger generation were regarding him 
with far other eyes. Of Jeffrey, when a lad in his teens, 
it is recorded that one day in the winter of 1786-87, as 
he stood on the High. Street of Edinburgh, staring at a 
man whose appearance struck him, a person at a shop 
door tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Aye, laddie, 
ye may weel look at that man. That's Robbie Burns." 
This was the young critic's first and last look at the poet 
of his country. 

But the most interesting of all the reminiscences of 
Burns, during his Edinburgh visit, or, indeed, during any 
other time, was the day when young Walter Scott met 
him, and received from him that one look of approbation. 

This is the account of that meeting which Scott him- 
self gave to Lockhart: "As for Burns, I may truly say, 
' Virgilium vidi tantum.^ I was a lad of fifteen when he 
came to Edinburgh. I saw him one day at the late ven- 
erable Professor Adam Fergusson's. Of course we young- 
sters sat silent, looked and listened. The only thing I 
remembered which was remarkable in Burns's manner, 



II.] FIRST WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 53 

was the effect produced upon him by a print of Bunbury's, 
representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog 
sitting in misery on one side — on the other, his widow, 
with a child in her arms. These lines were written be- 
neath : 

' Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain. 
Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain — 
Bent o'er the babe, her eye dissolved in dew, 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 
Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery baptized in tears.' 

" Burns seemed much affected by the print : he actual- 
ly shed tears. He asked whose the lines were, and it 
chanced that nobody but myself remembered that they 
occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's, called by 
the unpromising title of The Justice of Peace. I whisper- 
ed my information to a friend present, who mentioned it 
to Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, 
which though of mere civility, I then received with very 
great pleasure. His person was strong and robust; his 
manner rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness 
and simplicity. His countenance was more massive than 
it looks in any of the portraits. I would have taken the 
poet, had I not known who he was, for a very sagacious 
country farmer of the old Scotch school — the douce gude- 
man who held his own plough. There was a strong ex- 
pression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; 
the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and 
temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which 
glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feel- 
ing or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human 
head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of 
my time." 



54 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

AVhilc men of the upper ranks, old and young, were 
thus receiving their impressions, and forming their various 
estimates of Burns, he, we may be sure, was not behind- 
hand in his reflections on them, and on himself. He had 
by nature his full share of that gnawing self-consciousness 
which haunts the irritable tribe, from which no modern 
poet but Walter Scott has been able wholly to escape. 
While he was bearing himself thus manfully to outward 
appearance, inwardly he was scrutinizing himself and 
others with a morbid sensitiveness. In the heyday of his 
Edinburgh popularity, he writes to Mrs. Dunlop, one of 
his most trusted friends, what he repeats to other corre- 
spondents, that he had long been at pains to take a true 
measure of himself and to form a just estimate of his 
powers ; that this self-estimate was not raised by his pres- 
ent success, nor would it be depressed by future neglect ; 
that though the tide of popularity was now at full flood, 
he foresaw that the ebb would soon set in, and that he 
was prepared for it. In the same letters he speaks of his 
having too much pride for servility, as though there was 
no third and more excellent way ; of " the stubborn pride 
of his own bosom," on which he seems mainly to have 
relied. Indeed, throughout his life there is much talk of 
what Mr. Carlyle well calls the altogether barren and un- 
fruitful principle of pride ; much prating about " a certain 
fancied rock of independence" — a rock which he found 
but a poor shelter when the worst ills of life overtook 
him. This feeling reached its height when, soon after 
leaving Edinburgh, we find him writing to a comrade in 
the bitterness of his heart that the stateliness of Edinburgh 
patricians and the meanness of Mauchline plebeians had 
so disgusted him with his kind, that he had bought a 
pocket copy of Milton to study the character of Satan, 



H.J FIRST WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 55 

as the great exemplar of " intrepid, unyielding indepen- 
dence." 

If during his stay in Edinburgh, his " irascible humour " 
never went so far as this, " the contumely of condescen- 
sion " must have entered pretty deeply into the soul of 
the proud peasant when he made the following memorable 
entry in his diary, on the 9th April, 1787. After some 
remarks on the difficulty of true friendship, and the haz- 
ard of losing men's respect by being too confidential with 
friends, he goes on : " For these reasons, I am determined 
to make these pages my confidant. I will sketch every 
character that any way strikes me, to the best of my 
power, with unshrinking justice. I will insert anecdotes 
and take down remarks, in the old law phrase, without 
feud or favour. ... I think a lock and key a security at 
least equal to the bosom of any friend whatever. My 
own private story likewise, my love adventures, my ram- 
bles ; the frowns and smiles of fortune on my hardship ; 
my poems and fragments, that must never see the light, 
shall be occasionally inserted. In short, never did four 
shillings purchase so much friendship, since confidence 
went first to the market, or, honesty was set up for sale. . . . 

"There are few of the sore evils under the sun give me 
more uneasiness and chagrin, than the comparison how a 
man of genius, nay, of avowed worth, is received every- 
where, with the reception which a mere ordinary charac- 
ter, decorated with the trappings and futile distinctions of 
fortune, meets : I imagine a man of abilities, his breast 
glowing with honest pride, conscious that men are born 
equal, still giving honour to whom honour is due ; he 
meets at a great man's table a Squire Something or a Sir 
Somebody ; he knows the noble landlord at heart gives 
the bard, or whatever lie is, a share of his good wishes, be- 



56 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

yond, perhaps, any one at tlie table ; yet how will it mor- 
tify him to see a fellow whose abilities would scarcely 
have made an eightpenny tailor, and whose heart is not 
worth three farthings, meet with attention and notice that 
are withheld from the son of genius and poverty ! 

" The noble Glencairn has wounded me to the soul here, 
because I dearly esteem, respect, and love him. He show- 
ed so much attention, engrossing attention, one day, to 
the only blockhead at table (the whole company consisted 
of his lordship, dunder-pate, and myself), that I was with- 
in half a point of throwing down my gage of contemptu- 
ous defiance, but he shook my hand and looked so benev- 
olently good at parting, God bless him ! though I should 
never see him more, I shall love him to my dying day ! 
I am pleased to think I am so capable of gratitude, as I 
am miserably deficient in some other virtues." 

Lockhart, after quoting largely from this Common-place 
Book, adds, " This curious document has not yet been 
printed entire. Another generation will, no doubt, see 
the whole of the confession." All that remains of it has 
recently been given to the world. The original design 
was not carried out, and what is left is but a fragment, 
written chiefly in Edinburgh, with a few additions made 
at Ellisland. The only characters which are sketched are 
those of Blair, Stewart, Creech, and Greenfield. The re- 
marks on Blair, if not very appreciative, are mild and 
not unkindly. There seems to be irony in the praise of 
Dugald Stewart for the very qualities in which Burns 
probably thought him to be deficient. Creech's strangely 
composite character is well touched off. Dr. Greenfield, 
the colleague of Dr. Blair, whose eloquence Burns on an 
unfortunate occasion preferred to that of his host, alone 
comes in for an unaffected eulogy. The plain and manly 



II.] FIRST WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 5t 

directness of these prose sketches is in striking contrast 
to the ambitious flights which the poet attempts in many 
of his letters. 

Dugald Stewart in his cautious way hints that Burns 
did not always keep himself to the learned circles which 
had welcomed him, but sometimes indulged in " not very 
select society." How much this cautious phrase covers 
may be seen by turning to Heron's account of some of 
the scenes in which Burns mingled. Tavern life was 
then in Edinburgh, as elsewhere, more or less habitual in 
all classes. In those clubs and brothei'hoods of the mid- 
dle class, which met in taverns down the closes and wynds 
of High Street, Burns found a welcome, warmer, freer, 
more congenial than any vouchsafed to him in more pol- 
ished coteries. Thither convened when their day's work 
was done, lawyers, writers, schoolmasters, printers, shop- 
keepers, tradesmen — ranting, roaring boon-companions — 
who gave themselves up, for the time, to coarse songs, 
rough raillery, and deep drinking. At these meetings all 
restraint w^as cast to the winds, and the mirth drove fast 
and furious. With open arms the clubs welcomed the 
poet to their festivities ; each man proud to think that 
he was carousing with Robbie Burns. The poet the while 
gave full vein to all his impulses, mimicking, it is said, 
and satirizing his superiors in position, who, he fancied, 
had looked on him coldly, paying them off by making 
them the butt of his raillery, letting loose all his varied 
powers, wit, humour, satire, drollery, and throwing off 
from time to time snatches of licentious song, to be pick- 
ed up by eager listeners — song wildly defiant of all the 
proprieties. The scenes which Burns there took part in 
far exceeded any revelries he had seen in the clubs of 



58 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

Tarbolton and Mauchline, and did hira no good. If we 
may trust the testimony of Heron, at the meetings of a 
certain Crochallan club, and at other such uproarious gath- 
erings, he made acquaintances who, before that winter was 
over, led him on from tavern dissipations to still worse 
haunts and habits. 

By the 21st of April (l'787), the ostensible object for 
which Burns had come to Edinburgh Avas attained, and 
the second edition of his poems appeared in a handsome 
octavo volume. The publisher .was Creech, then chief of 
his trade in Scotland. The volume was published by sub- 
scription " for the sole benefit of the ' author," and the 
subscribers were so numerous that the list of them cov- 
ered thirty-eight pages. In that list appeared the names 
of many of the chief men of Scotland, some of whom 
subscribed for twenty — Lord Eglinton for as many as 
forty-two copies. Chambers thinks that full justice has 
never been done to the liberality of the Scottish public 
in the way they subscribed for this volume. Nothing 
equal to the patronage that Burns at this time met with 
had been seen since the days of Pope's Iliad. This sec- 
ond edition, besides the poems which had appeared in the 
Kilmarnock one, contained several additional pieces, the 
most important of which had been composed before the 
Edinburgh visit. Such were Death and Doctor Hornbook^ 
The Brigs of Ayr, The Ordination, The Address to the 
Unco Guid. The proceeds from this volume ultimately 
made Burns the possessor of about 500/., quite a little 
fortune for one who, as he himself confesses, had never 
before had 10/. he could call his own. It would, however, 
have been doubly welcome and useful to him, had it been 
paid down without needless delay. But unfortunately 



II.] FIRST WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 69 

this was not Creech's way of transacting business, so that 
Burns was kept for many months waiting for a settle- 
ment — months during which he could not, for want of 
money, turn to any fixed employment, and which were 
therefore spent by him unprofitably enough. 



CHAPTER III. 

BORDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS. 

Some small instalments of the profits of his new volume 
enabled our Poet, during the summer and autumn of 1787, 
to make several tours to various districts of Scotland, fa- 
mous either for scenery or song. The day of regular tour- 
ing had not yet set in, and few Scots at that time would 
have thought of visiting what Burns called the classic 
scenes of their country. A generation before this, poets 
in England had led the way in this — as when Gray visited 
the lakes of Cumberland, and Dr. Johnson the Highlands 
and the Western Isles. In his ardour to look upon places 
famous for their natural beauty or their historic associa- 
tions, or even for their having been mentioned in some 
old Scottish song, Burns surpassed both Gray and John- 
son, and anticipated the sentiment of the present century. 
Early in May he set out with one of his Crochallan club 
acquaintances, named Ainslie, on a journey to the Border. 
Ainslie was a native of the Merse, his father and family 
living in Dunse. Starting thence with Ainslie, Burns trav- 
ersed the greater part of the vale of Tweed from Cold- 
stream to Peebles, recalling, as he went along, snatches of 
song connected with the places he passed. He turned 
aside to see the valley of the Jed, and got as far as Selkirk 
in the hope of looking upon Yarrow. But from doing this 
lie was hindered by a day of unceasinor rain, and he who 



CHAP. III.] BORDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS. 61 

was so soon to become the chief singer of Scottish song- 
was never allowed to look on that vale which has long been 
its most ideal home. Before finishing his tour, he went as 
far as Nithsdale, and surveyed the farm of Ellisland, with 
some thought already that he might yet become the ten- 
ant of it. 

It is noteworthy, but not wonderful, that the scenes vis- 
ited in this tour called forth no poetry from Burns, save 
here and there an allusion that occurred in some of his 
later songs. When we remember with what an uneasy 
heart Burns left Ayrshire for Edinburgh, that the town 
life he had there led for the last six months had done 
nothing to lighten — it had probably done something to 
increase the load of his mental disquietude — that iu an 
illness which he had during his tour he confesses that 
" embittering remorse was scaring his fancy at the gloomy 
forebodings of death," and that when his tour was over, 
soon after his return to Edinburgh, he found the law let 
loose against him, and what was called a " fugte " warrant 
issued for his apprehension, owing to some occurrence like 
to that which a year ago had terrified him with legal pen- 
alties, and all but driven hira to Jamaica — when all these 
things are remembered, is it to be wondered that Burns 
should have wandered by the banks of Tweed, in no mood 
to chaunt beside it "a music sweeter than its own?" 

At the close of his Border tour Burns had, as we have 
seen, visited Nithsdale and looked at the farm of Ellisland. 
From Nithsdale he made his way back to native Ayrshire 
and his family at Mossgiel. I have heard a tradition that 
his mother met him at the door of the small farm-house, 
with this. only salutation, " O Robbie !" Neither Lockhart 
nor Chambers mentions this, but the latter says, his sister, 
Mrs. Begg, remembered the arrival of her brother. He 



6!i ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

came in unheralded, and was in the midst of them before 
they knew. It was a quiet meeting, for the Mossgiel fam- 
ily had the true Scottish reticence or reserve ; but though 
their words were not " mony feck," their feelings were 
strong. It was, indeed, as strange a reverse as ever was 
made by fortune's fickle wheel. " He had left them," to 
quote the words of Lockhart, "comparatively unknown, 
his tenderest feelings torn and wounded by the behaviour 
of the Armours, and so miserably poor that he had been 
for some weeks obliged to skulk from the sheriff's officers 
to avoid the payment of a paltry debt. He returned, his 
poetical fame established, the whole country ringing with 
his praise, from a capital in which he was known to have 
formed the wonder and delight of the polite and the learn- 
ed ; if not» rich, yet with more money already than any of 
his kindred had ever hoped to see him possess, and with 
prospects of future patronage and permanent elevation in 
the scale of society, which might have dazzled steadier eyes 
than those of maternal and fraternal affection. The proph- 
et had at last honour in his own country, but the haughty 
spirit that had preserved its balance in Edinburgh was not 
likely to lose it at Mauchline." The haughty spirit of 
which Lockhart speaks was reserved for others than his 
own family. To them wo hear of nothing but simple af- 
fection. His youngest sister, Mrs. Begg, told Chambers, 
"that her brother went to Glasgow, and thence sent home 
a present to his mother and three sisters, namely, a quan- 
tity of mode silk, enough to make a bonnet and a cloak to 
each, and a gown besides to his mother and youngest sis- 
ter." This was the way he took to mark their right to 
shai'e in his prosperity. Mrs. Begg remembers going for 
rather more than a week to Ayr to assist in making up 
the dresses, and when she came back on a Saturday, her 



HI.] BOEDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS. 63 

brother liad returned and requested her "to put on her 
dress that he might see how smart she looked in it." The 
thing that stirred his pride and scorn' was the servility with 
which he was now received by his " plebeian brethren " in 
the neighbourhood, and chief among these by the Armours, 
who had formerly eyed him with looks askance. If any- 
thing "had been wanting to disgust me completely with 
Armour's family, their mean, servile compliance would have 
done it." So he writes, and it was this disgust that prompt- 
ed him to furnish himself, as we have seen he did, with a 
pocket copy of Milton, to study the character of Satan. 
This fierce indignation was towards the family ; towards 
" bonny Jean " herself his feeling was far other. Having 
accidentally met her, his old affection revived, and they 
were soon as intimate as of old. 

After a short time spent at Mossgiel wandering about, 
and once, it would seem, penetrating the West Highlands 
as far as Inverary, a journey during which his temper seems 
to have been far from serene, he returned in August to 
Edinburgh. There he encountered, and in time got rid of, 
the law troubles already alluded to; and on the 25th of 
August he set out, on a longer tour than any he had yet 
attempted, to the Northern Highlands. 

The travellinfv companion whom he chose for this tour 
was a certain Mr. Nicol, whose acquaintance he seems to 
have first formed at the Crochallan club, or some other 
haunt of boisterous joviality. After many ups and downs 
in life Nicol had at last, by dint of some scholastic ability, 
settled as a master of the Edinburgh High School. What 
could have tempted Burns to select such a man for a fel- 
low-traveller ? He was cast in one of nature's roughest 
moulds; a man of careless habits, coarse manners, enor- 
mous vanity, of most irascible and violent temper, which 



64 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

vented itself in cruelties on the poor boys who were the 
victims of his care. Burns compared himself with such a 
companion to " a man travelling w'ith a loaded blunderbuss 
at full cock." Two thing's only are mentioned in his fa- 
vour, that he had a warm heart, and an unbounded admira- 
tion of the poet. But the choice of such a man was an 
unfortunate one, and in the upshot did not a little to spoil 
both the pleasure and the benefit which might have been 
gathered from the tour. 

Their journey lay by Stirling and Crieff to Taymouth 
and Breadalbane, thence to Athole, on through Badenoch 
and Strathspey to Inverness. The return by the east coast 
was through the counties of Moray and Banff to Aberdeen. 
After visiting the county whence his father had come, and 
his kindred who w^ere still in Kincardineshire, Burns and 
his companion passed by Perth back to Edinburgh, which 
they reached on the 16th of September. The journey oc- 
cupied only two and twenty days, far too short a time to 
see so much country, besides making several visits, with 
any advantage. During his Border tour Burns had ridden 
his Rosinante mare, which he had named Jenny Geddes. 
As his friend, the schoolmaster, was no equestrian, Burns 
was obliged to make his northern journey in a post-chaise, 
not the best way of taking in the varied and ever-chang- 
ing sights and sounds of Highland scenery. 

Such a tour as this, if Burns could have entered on it 
under happier auspices, that is, with a heart at ease, a fit- 
ting companion, and leisure enough to view quietly the 
scenes through which he passed, and to* enjoy the society 
of the people whom he met, could not have failed, from 
its own intcrestingness, and its novelty to him, to have en- 
riched his imagination, and to have called forth some last- 
ino- memorials. As it was, it cannot be said to have done 



III.] BORDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS. r,5 

either. There are, however, a few ineidents which are 
worth noting. The first of these took place at Stirling. 
Burns and his companion had ascended the Castle Rock, 
to look on the blue mountain rampart that flanks the 
Highlands from Ben Lomond to Benvoirlich. As they 
were both strongly attached to the Stuart cause, they had 
seen with indignation, on the slope of the Castle' hill, the 
ancient hall, in which the Scottish kings once held their 
Parliaments, lying ruinous and neglected. On returning 
to their inn. Burns, with a diamond he had bought for 
such purposes, wrote on the window-pane of his room 
some lines expressive of the disgust he had felt at that 
sight, concluding with some offensive remarks on the 
reigning family. The lines, which had no poetic merit, 
got into the newspapers of the day, and caused a good 
deal of comment. On a subsequent visit to Stirling, Burns 
himself broke the pane of the window on which the ob- 
noxious lines were written, but they were remembered, it 
is said, long afterwards to his disadvantage. 

Among the pleasantest incidents of the tour was the 
visit to Blair Castle, and his reception by the Duchess of 
Athole. The two days he spent there he declared were 
among the happiest of his life. We have seen how sensi- 
tive Burns was to the way he was received by the great. 
Resentful as he was equally of condescension and of neg- 
lect, it must have been no easy matter for persons of rank 
so to adapt their manner as to exactly please him. But 
his hosts at Blair Castle succeeded to admiration in this. 
They were assisted by the presence at the Castle of Mr., 
afterwards Professor, Walker, who had known Burns in 
Edinburgh, and was during that autumn living as a tutor 
in the Duke's family. At dinner Burns was in his most 
pleasing vein, and delighted his hostess by drinking to the 

4 



66 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

health of her group of fair young children, as " honest men 
and bonny lassies " — an expression with which he happily 
closes his Petition of Bruar Water. The Duchess had her 
two sisters, Mrs. Graham and Miss Cathcart, staying with 
her on a visit, and all three ladies were delighted with the 
conversation of the poet. These three sisters were daugh- 
ters of a Lord Cathcart, and were remarkable for their 
beauty. The second, Mrs. Graham, has been immortalized 
as the subject of one of Gainsborough's most famous por- 
traits. On her early death her husband, Thomas Graham 
of Balnagown, never again looked on that beautiful picture, 
but left his home for a soldier's life, distinguished himself 
greatly in the Peninsular AVar, and was afterwards known 
as Lord Lynedoch. After his death, the picture passed 
to his nearest relatives, who presented it to the National 
Portrait Gallery of Scotland, of which it is now the chief 
ornament. All three sisters soon passed away, having 
died even before the short-lived poet. By their beauty 
and their agreeableness they charmed Burns, and did much 
to make his visit delightful. They themselves were not 
less pleased ; for when the poet proposed to leave, after 
two days were over, they pressed him exceedingly to stay, 
and even sent a messenger to the hotel to persuade the 
driver of Burns's chaise to pull off one of the horse's shoes, 
that his departure might be delayed. Burns himself would 
willingly have listened to their entreaties, but his travelling 
mate was inexorable. Likely enough Nicol had not been 
made so much of as the poet, and this was enough to rouse 
his irascible temper. For one day he had been persuaded 
to stay by the offer of good trout-fishing, which he great- 
ly relished, but now he insisted on being off. Burns was 
reluctantly forced to yield. 

This rapid departure was the more unfortunate because 



til.] BORDER AXD HIGHLAND TOURS. 67 

Mr. Dun das, who held the keys of Scottish patronage, was 
expected on a visit to Blair, and had he met the poet he 
might have vi^iped out the reproach often cast on the min- 
istry of the day, that they failed in their duty towards 
Burns. "That eminent statesman," as Lockbart says, 
" was, though little addicted to literature, a warm lover of 
his own country, and, in general, of whatever redounded 
to her honour ; he was, moreover, very especially qualified 
to appreciate Burns as a companion ; and had such an in- 
troduction taken place, he might not improbably have been 
induced to bestow that consideration on the claims of the 
pool, w^hich, in the absence of any personal acquaintance, 
Burns's wojks ought to have received at his hands." But 
during that visit Burns met, and made the acquaintance 
of, another man of some influence, Mr. Graham of Fintray, 
whose friendship afterwards, both in the Excise business, 
and in other matters, stood him in good stead. The Duke, 
as he bade farewell to Burns at Blair, advised him to turn 
aside, and see the Falls of the Bruar, about six miles from 
the Castle, where that stream coming down from its moun- 
tains plunges over some high precipices, and passes through 
a rocky gorge to join the River Garry. Burns did so, and 
finding the falls 'entirely bare of wood, wrote some hues 
entitled The Humble Petition of Bruar Water, in which 
he makes the stream entreat the Duke to clothe its na- 
ked banks with trees. The poet's petition for the stream 
was not in vain. The then Duke of Athole was famous 
as a planter of trees, and those with which, after the 
poet's Petition, he surrounded the waterfall remain to this 
day. 

After visiting Culloden Muir, the Fall of Fyers, Kilra- 
vock Castle, where, but for the impatience of Mr. Nicol, he 
would fain have prolonged his stay, he came on to Focha- 



68 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

bers and Gordon Castle. This is Burns's entry in his di- 
ary : — "Cross Spey to Fochabers, fine palace, worthy of 
the noble, the polite, and generous proprietor. The Duke 
makes me happier than ever great man did ; noble, prince- 
ly, yet mild and condescending and affable — gay and kind. 
The Duchess, charming, witty, kind, and sensible. God 
bless them !" 

Here, too, as at Blair, the ducal hosts seem to have en- 
tirely succeeded in making Burns feel at ease, and wish to 
protract his visit. But here, too, more emphatically than 
at Blair, his friend spoilt the game. This is the account 
of the incident, as given by Lockhart, with a few additions 
interpolated from Chambers : 

" Burns, who had been much noticed by this noble fam- 
ily when in Edinburgh, happened to present himself at 
Gordon Castle just at the dinner-hour, and being invited 
to take a place at the table, did so, without for a moment 
adverting to the circumstance that his travelling compan- 
ion had been left alone at the inn, in the adjacent village. 
On remembering this soon after dinner, he begged to be 
allowed to rejoin his friend ; and the Duke of Gordon, 
who now for the first time learned that he was not jour- 
neying alone, immediately proposed to send an invitation 
to Mr. Nicol to come to the Castle. His Grace sent a 
messenger to bear it; but Burns insisted on himself ac- 
companying him. They found the haughty schoolmaster 
striding up and down before the inn-door in a high state 
of wrath and indignation at, what he considered, Burns's 
neglect, and no apologies could soften his mood. He had 
already ordered horses, and was venting his anger on the 
postillion for the slowness with which he obeyed his com- 
mands. The poet, finding that he must choose between 
the ducal circle and his irascible associate, at once chose 



III.] BORDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS. 69 

the latter alternative. Nicol and he, in silence and mut- 
ual displeasure, seated themselves in the post-chaise j and 
turned their backs on Gordon Castle, where the poet had 
promised himself some happy days. This incident may 
serve to suggest some of the annoyances to which persons 
moving, like our poet, on the debatable land between two 
different ranks of society must ever be subjected." " To 
play the lion under such circumstances must," as the know- 
ing Lockhart observes, " be difficult at the best ; but a del- 
icate business indeed, when the jackals are presumptuous. 
The pedant could not stomach the superior success of his 
friend^and yet — alas for poor human nature ! — he certainly 
was one of the most enthusiastic of his admirers, and one 
of the most affectionate of all his intimates." It seems 
that the Duchess of Gordon had some hope that her friend, 
Mr. Addington, afterwards Lord Sidmouth and the future 
premier, would have visited at Gordon Castle while Burns 
was there. Mr. Addington was, Allan Cunningham tells 
us, an enthusiastic admirer of Burns's poetry, and took 
pleasure in quoting it to Pitt and Melville. On that oc- 
casion he was unfortunately not able to accept the invita- 
tion of the Duchess, but he forwarded to her " these meui- 
orable lines — memorable as the first indication of that 
deep love which England now entertains for the genius of 
Burns :" 

" Yes ! pride of Scotia's favoured plains, 'tis thine 
The warmest feelings of the heart to move ; 
To bid it throb with sympathy divine, 
To glow with friendship, or to melt with love. 

" What though each morning sees thee rise to toil. 
Though Plenty on thy cot no blessing showers, 
Yet Independence cheers thee with her smile, 
And Fancy strews thv moorland with her flowers ! 



•70 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

" And dost thou blame the impartial will of Heaven, 
Untaught of life the good and ill to scan ? 
To thee the Muse's choicest wreath is given — 
To thee the genuine dignity of man ! 

" Then to the want of worldly gear resigned, 
Be grateful for the wealth of thy exhaustless mind." 

It was well enouo-h for Mr. Addington, and such as he, 
to advise Burns to be content with the want of worldly 
gear, and to refer him for consolation to the dignity of 
man and the wealth of his exhaustless mind. Burns had 
abundance of such sentiments in himself to bring forth, 
when occasion required. He did not need to be replen- 
ished with these from the stores of men who held the 
keys of patronage. What he wanted from them was 
some solid benefit, such as they now and then bestowed 
on their favourites, but which unfortunately they with- 
held from Burns. 

An intelligent boy, who was guide to Burns and Nicol 
from Cullen to Duff House, gave long afterwards his re- 
membrances of that day. Among these this occurs. The 
boy was asked by Nicol if he had read Burns's poems, and 
which of them he liked best. The boy replied, " ' I was 
much entertained with The Twa Doya and Death and Dr. 
Hornbook, but I like best The Cotter^ s Saturday Night, al- 
though it made me greet when my father had me to read 
it to my mother.' Burns, with a sudden start, looked at 
my face intently, and patting my shoulder, said, ' Well, 
my callant, I don't wonder at your greeting at reading the 
poem ; it made me greet more than once when I was writ- 
ing it at my father's fireside.' "... 

On the 16th of September, 1787, the two travellers re- 
turned to Edinburgh. This tour produced little poetry 
directly, and what it did produce was not of a high order. 



111.] BORDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS, 71 

In this respect one cannot but contrast it with the poetic 
results of another tour made, partly over the same ground, 
by another poet, less than twenty years after this time. 
When Wordsworth and his sister made their first visit to 
Scotland in 1803, it called forth some strains of such per- 
fect beauty as will live while the English language lasts. 
Burns's poetic fame would hardly be diminished if all that 
he wrote on his tours were obliterated from his works. 
Perhaps we ought to except some allusions in his future 
songs,-ftnd especially that grand song, Macpherson' s Fare- 
well, which, though composed several months after this 
tour was over, must have drawn its materials from the day 
spent at Duff House, where he was shown the sword of 
the Highland Reiver. 

But look at the lines composed after his first sight of 
Breadalbane, which he left in the inn at Kenmore. These 
Lockhart has pronounced among " the best of his purely 
English heroics " If so, we can but say hojy poor are the 
best ! What is to be thought of such lines as 

" Poetic ardours in my bosom swell, 
Lone wandering by the hermit's mossy cell," etc., etc. 

Nor less stilted, forced, and artificial are the lines in the 
same measure written at the Fall of Fyers. 

The truth is, that Burns's forte by no means lay in de- 
scribing scenery alone, and for its own sake. All his real- 
ly inspired descriptions of it occur as adjuncts to human 
incident or feeling, slips of landscape let in as a back- 
ground. Again, as Burns was never at his best when 
called on to write for occasions — no really spontaneous 
poet ever can be — so when taken to see much talked-of 
scenes, and expected to express poetic raptures over thorn. 
Burns did not answer to the call. 



12 ROBERT BURx\8. [chap. 

"He disliked," we are told, "to be tutored in matters 
of taste, and could not endure that one should run shout- 
ing before him, whenever any fine object came in sight." 
On one occasion of this kind, a lady at the poet's side 
said, " Burns, have you nothing to say of this ?" " Noth- 
ing, madam," he replied, glancing at the leader of the 
party, " for an ass is braying over it." Burns is not the 
only person who has suffered from this sort of officious- 
ness. 

Besides this, the tours were not made in the way which 
most conduces to poetic composition. He did not allow 
himself the quiet and the leisure from interruption which 
are needed. It was not with such companions as Ainslie 
or Nicol by his side that the poet's eye discovered new 
beauty in the sight of a solitary reaper in a Highland glen, 
and his ear caught magical suggestiveness in the words, 
" What ! you are stepping westward," heard by the even- 
ing lake. 

Another hindrance to happy poetic description by Bums 
during these journeys was that he had now forsaken his 
native vernacular, and taken to writing in English after 
the mode of the poets of the day. This with him was to 
unclothe himself of his true strength. His correspondent, 
Dr. Moore, and his Edinburgh critics had no doubt coun- 
selled him to write in English, and he listened for a time 
too easily to their counsel. He and they little knew what 
they were doing in giving and taking such advice. The 
truth is, when he used his own Scottish dialect he was un- 
approached, unapproachable ; no poet before or since has 
evoked out of that instrument so perfect and so varied 
melodies. When he wrote in English he was seldom more 
than third-rate ; in fact, he was but a common clever versi- 
iior. There is but one purely English poem of his which 



HI.] BORDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS. 1Z 

at all approaches the first rank — the lines To Mary in 
Heaven. 

These may probably have been the reasons, but the fact 
is certain that Burns's tours are disappointing in their 
direct poetic fruits. But in another way Burns turned 
them to good account. He had by that time begun to 
devote himself almost entirely to the cultivation of Scot- 
tish song. This was greatly encouraged by the appear- 
ance oi^ohnsons Museum, a publication in which an en- 
graver of that name living in Edinburgh had undertaken 
to make a thorough collection of all the best of the old 
Scottish songs, accompanying them with the best airs, and 
to add to these any new songs of merit which he could 
lay hands on. Before Burns left Edinburgh for his Bor- 
der tour, he had begun an acquaintance and correspond- 
ence with Johnson, and had supplied him with four songs 
of his own for the first volume of The Museum. The 
second volume was now in progress, and his labors for 
this publication, and for another of the same kind to be 
afterwards mentioned, henceforth engrossed Burns's entire 
productive faculty, and were to be his only serious literary 
work for the rest of his life. He therefore employed the 
Highland tour in hearing all he could, that had any bear- 
ing on his now absorbing pursuit, and in collecting mate- 
rials that might promote it. With this view, when on his 
way from Taymouth to Blair, he had turned aside to visit 
the famous fiddler and composer of Scotch tunes, Neil 
Gow, at his house, \vhich is still pointed out, at Inver, on 
the Braan Water, opposite the grounds of Dunkeld. This 
is the entry about him in Burns's diary : — " Neil Gow 
plays — a short, stout-built, honest Highland figure, with his 
grey hair shed on his honest social brow ; an interesting 
face marking strong sense, kind open-heartedness, mixed 

4* 



H ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

with immistrusting simplicity ; visit his house ; Margaret 
Gow." It is interesting to think of this meeting of these 
two — the one a LowJander, the other a Highlander ; the 
one the greatest composer of words, the other of tunes, 
for Scottish songs, which their country has produced. 

As he passed through Aberdeen, Burns met Bishop 
Skinner, a Bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church ; and 
when he learnt that the Bishop's father, the author of the 
song of Tidloch-gorum, and The Ernie wi'' the crookit horn, 
and other Scottish songs, was still aiive, an aged Episco- 
palian clergyman, living in primitive simplicity in a hut 
and a hen at Lishart, near Peterhead, and that on his way 
to Aberdeen he had passed near the place without know- 
ing it. Burns expressed the greatest regret at having miss- 
ed seeing the author of songs he so greatly admired. 
Soon after his return to Edinburgh, he received from old 
Mr. Skinner a rhyming epistle, which greatly pleased the 
poet, and to which he replied — " I regret, and while I live 
shall regret, that when I was north I had not the pleasure 
of paying a younger brother's dutiful respect to the author 
of the best Scotch song ever Scotland saw, Tulloch-gorum s 
my delightr This is strong, perhaps too strong praise. 
Allan Cunningham, in his Songs of Scotland, thus freely 
comments on it : — " Tulloch-gorum is a lively clever song, 
but I would never have edited this collection had I thought 
with Burns that it is the best song Scotland ever saw. I 
may say with the king in my favourite ballad — 

" I trust I have within my realm. 
Five hundred good as he." 

We also find Burns, on his return to Edinburgh, writing 
to the librarian at Gordon Castle to obtain from him a 
correct copy of a Scotch song composed by the Duke, in 



iji.] BORDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS. 75 

the current vernacular style, Cauld Kail in Aberdeen. This 
correct copy he wished to insert in the forthcoming vol- 
ume of Johnson's Museum, with the name of the author 
appended. 

At Perth he made inquiries, we are told, " as to the 
whereabouts of the burn-brae on which be the graves of 
Bessy Bell and Mary Gray." Whether he actually visited 
the spot^near the Almond Water, ten miles west of Perth, 
is left uncertain. The pathetic story of these two hapless 
maidens, and the fine old song founded on it, had made it 
to him a consecrated spot. 

" Bessy Bell and Mary Gray ! 
They were twa bonny lasses, 
They biggit a bower on yon burn-brae, 
And theekit it owre wi' rashes," 

is the beginning of a beautiful song which Allan Ramsay 
did his best to spoil, as he did in many another instance. 
Sir Walter Scott afterwards recovered some of the old 
verses which Ramsay's had superseded, and repeated them 
to Allan Cunningham, who gives them in his So7igs of 
Scotland. Whether Burns knew any more of the song 
than the one old verse given above, with Ramsay's append- 
ed to it, is more than doubtful. 

As he passed through Perth he secured an introduction 
to the family of Belches of Invermay, that, on crossing the 
River Earn on his southward journey, he might be enabled 
to see the little valley, running down from the Ochils to 
the Earn, which has been consecrated by the old and well- 
known song. The Birks of Invermay. 

It thus appears that the old songs of Scotland, their 
localities, their authors, and the incidents whence they 
arose, were now uppermost in the thoughts of Burns, 



76 KOBEKT BURNS. [chaf. 

whatever part of his country he visited. This was as in- 
tense and as genuinely poetical an interest, though a more 
limited one, than that with which Walter Scott's eye af- 
terwards ranged over the same scenes. The time was not 
yet full come for that wide and varied sympathy, with 
which Scott surveyed the whole past of his country's his- 
torv, nor was Burns's nature or training such as to give 
him that catholicity of feeling which was required to sym- 
pathize, as Scott did, with all ranks and all ages. Neither 
could he have so seized on the redeeming virtues of rude 
and half-barbarous times, and invested them with that halo 
of romance which Scott has thrown over them. This ro- 
mantic and chivalrous colouring was an element altogether 
alien to Burns's character. But it may well be, that these 
very limitations intensified the depth and vividness of 
sympathy with which Burns conceived the human situa- 
tions portrayed in his best songs. 

There was one more brief tour of ten days during Octo- 
ber, 1787, which Burns made in the company of Dr. Adair. 
They passed first to Stirling, where Burns broke the ob- 
noxious pane ; then paid a second visit to Harvieston, near 
Dollar — for Burns had paid a flying visit of one day there, 
at the end of August, before passing northward to the 
Highlands — where Burns introduced his friend, and seems 
to have flirted with some Ayrshire young ladies, relations 
of his friend Gavin Hamilton. Thence they passed on a 
visit to Mr. Ramsay at Ochtertyre, on the Teith, a few 
miles west from Stirling. They then visited Sir William 
Murray at Ochtertyre, in Strathearn, where Burns wrote his 
Lines on scaring some waterfowl in Lock Turit^ and a pret- 
ty pastoral song on a young beauty he met there, Miss 
Murray of Lintrose. From Strathearn he next seems to 
have returned by Clackmannan, there to visit the old lady 



iiL] BORDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS. 77 

who lived in the Tower, of whom he had heard from Mr. 
Ramsay. In this short journey the most memorable thing 
was the visit to Mr. Ramsay at his picturesque old country 
seat, situate on the River Teith, and commanding, down the 
vista of its old lime-tree avenue, so romantic a view of 
Stirling Castle rock. There Burns made the acquaintance 
of Mr. Ramsay, the laird, and was charmed with the con- 
versation of that " last of the Scottish line of Latinists, 
which began with Buchanan and ended with Gregory " — 
an antiquary, moreover, whose manners and home Lock- 
hart thinks that Sir Walter may have had in his recollec- 
tion when he drew the character of Monkbarns. Years 
afterwards, in a letter addressed to Dr. Currie, Ramsay 
thus wrote of Burns : — " I have been in the company of 
many men of genius, some of them poets, but I never wit- 
nessed such flashes of intellectual brightness as from him, 
the impulse of the moment, sparks of celestial fire. I 
never was more delighted, therefore, than with his com- 
pany two days tete-a-tete. In a mixed company I should 
have made little of him ; for, to use a gamester's phrase, he 
did not know^ when to play off, and when to play on. . . . 
When I asked whether the Edinburgh literati had mended 
his poems by their criticisms, 'Sir,' said he, 'these gen- 
tlemen remind me of some spinsters in my country, who 
spin their thread so fine, that it is neither fit for weft nor 
woof.' " 

There are other incidents recorded of that time. 
Among these was a visit to Mrs. Bruce, an old Scottish 
dame of ninety, who lived in the ancient Tower of Clack- 
mannan, upholding her dignity as the lineal descendant 
and representative of the family of King Robert Bruce, 
and cherishing the strongest attachment to the exiled 
Stuarts. Both of these sentimcuts found a ready response 



78 K0J3EKT JiURNS. [chap. 

from Burns. The one was exemplified by the old lady 
conferring knighthood on him and his companion with 
the actual sword of King Robert, which she had in her 
possession, remarking, as she did it, that she had a better 
right to confer the title than some folk. Another senti- 
ment she charmed the poet by expressing in the toast she 
gave after dinner, ^''Hooi Uncos,'''' that is, Away Strangers, 
a word used by shepherds when they bid their collies drive 
away strange sheep. Who the strangers were in this case 
may be guessed from her known Jacobite sentiments. 

On his way from Clackmannan to Edinburgh he turned 
aside to see Loch Leven and its island castle, which had 
been the prison of the hapless Mary Stuart; and thence 
passing to the Norman Abbey Church of Dunfermline, 
with deep emotion he looked on the grave of Robert 
Bruce. At that time the choir of the old church, which 
had contained the grave, had been long demolished, and 
the new structure which now covers it had not yet been 
thought of. The sacred spot was only marked by two 
broad flagstones, on which Burns knelt and kissed them, 
reproaching the while the barbarity that had so dishonour- 
ed the resting-place of Scotland's hero king. Then, with 
that sudden change of mood so characteristic of him, he 
passed within the ancient church, and mounting the pul- 
pit, addressed to his companion, who had, at his desire, 
mounted the cutty stool, or seat of repentance, a parod\ 
of the rebuke which lie himself had undergone some time 
before at Mauchline. 



CHAPTER IV. 

SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 

These summer and autumn wanderings ended, Burns re- 
turned to Edinburgh, and spent there the next five months, 
from the latter part of October, 1787, till the end of 
March, 1788, in a way which to any man, much more to 
such an one as he, could give small satisfaction. The os- 
tensible cause of his lingering in Edinburgh was to obtain 
a settlement with his procrastinating publisher, Creech, be- 
cause, till this was effected, he had no money with which 
to enter on the contemplated farm, or on any other regu- 
lar way of life. Probably in thus wasting his time, Burns 
may have been influenced more than he himself was aware, 
by a secret hope that something might yet be done for 
him — that all the smiles lavished on him by the great and 
powerful could not possibly mean nothing, and that hs 
should be left to drudge on in poverty and obscurity a^ 
before. 

During this winter Burns changed his quarters from 
Richmond's lodging in High Street, where he had lived 
during the former winter, to a house then marked 2, now 
30, St. James's Square in the New Town. There he lived 
with a Mr. Cruikshank, a colleague of his friend Nicol in 
the High School, and there he continued to reside till he 
left Edinburgh. More than once he paid brief visits to 
Nithsdale, and examined again and yet again the fai'm on 



80 ROIJERT BURiXS. • [chap. 

the Dalswintoii property, on which he had long had his 
eye. This was his only piece of serious business during 
those months. The rest of his time was spent more or 
less in the society of his jovial companions. We hear no 
more durinoj this second winter of his meeting's with lit- 
erary professors, able advocates and judges, or fashionable 
ladies. His associates seem to have been rather confined 
to men of the Ainslie and Nicol stamp. He would seeiu 
also to have amused himself with flirtations with several 
young heroines, whose acquaintance he had made during 
the previous summer. The chief of these were two young 
ladies. Miss Margaret Chalmers and Miss Charlotte Hamil- 
ton, cousins of each other, and relatives of his Mauchline 
friend, Gavin Hamilton. These he had met during the 
two visits which he paid to Harvieston, on the River Dev- 
on, where they were living for a time. On his return to 
Edinburgh he continued to correspond with them both, 
and to address songs of affection, if not of love, now to 
one, now to another. To Charlotte Hamilton he addressed 
the sono- beginning — 

" How pleasant the banks of the clear winding Devon ;" 

To Miss Chalmers, one with the opening lines — 

" Where, braving angry winter's storms, 
The lofty Oehils rise ;" 

And another beginning thus — 

" My Peggy's face, my Peggy's form." 

Which of these young ladies was foremost in Burns's af- 
fection, it is not easy now to say, nor does it much signify. 
To both he wrote some of his best letters, and some of not 
his best verses. x\llan Cunninorham thinks that he had 



IV.] SECOND WINTER 'IN EDINBURGH. 81 

serious affection for Miss Hamilton. The latest editor of 
his works asserts that his heart was set on Miss Chalmers, 
and that she, long- afterwards in her widowhood, told Thom- 
as Campbell, the poet, that Burns had made a proposal of 
marriage to Irer. However this may be, it is certain that 
while both admitted him to friendship, neither encouraged 
his advances. They were better " advised than to do so." 
Probably they knew too much of his past history and his 
character to think of him as a husband. Both were soon 
after this time married to men more likely to make them 
happy than the erratic poet. When they turned a deaf 
ear to his addresses, he wrote : " My rhetoric seems to have 
lost all its effect on the lovely half of mankind ; I have 
seen the day — but that is a tale of other years. In my con- 
science, I believe that my heart has been so often on fire 
that it has been vitrified !" Well perhaps for him if it 
had been so, such small power had he to guide it. Just 
about the time when he found himself rejected, notwith- 
standing all his fine letters and his verses, by the two 
young ladies on Devon banks, he met with an accident 
through the upsetting of a hackney-coach by a drunken 
driver. The fall left him with a bruised limb, which con- 
fined him to his room from the 7th of December till the 
middle of February (1788). 

During these weeks he suffered much from low spirits, 
and the letters which he then wrote under the influence of 
that hypochondria and despondency contain some of the 
gloomiest bursts of discontent with himself and with the 
world, which he ever gave vent to either in prose or verse. 
He describes himself as the " sport, the miserable victim 
of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonizing 
sensibility, and Bedlam passions. I wish I were dead, but 
I'm no like to die. ... I fear I am somethino; like, un- 



82 ROBERT 'BURNS. [chap. 

done ; but I hope for the best. Come, stubborn Pride 
and unshrinking Resohition ; accompany me through this 
to me miserable world ! I have a hundred times wished 
that one could resign life, as an officer resigns a commis- 
sion ; for I would not take in any poor wretch by selling- 
out. Lately I was a sixpenny private, and, God knows, a 
miserable soldier enough ; now 1 march to the campaign, 
a starving cadet — a little more conspicuously wretched." 

But his late want of success on. the banks of Devon, 
and his consequent despondency, were alike dispelled from 
his thoughts by a new excitement. Just at the time when 
he met with his accident, he had made the acquaintance 
of a certain Mrs. M'Lehose, and acquaintance all at once 
became a violent attachment on both sides. This lady 
had been deserted by her husband, who had gone to the 
West Indies, leaving her in poverty and obscurity to bring 
up two young boys as best she might. We are told that 
she was "of a somewhat voluptuous style of beauty, of 
lively and easy manners, of a poetical fabric of mind, with 
some wit, and not too high a degree of refinement or deli- 
cacy — exactly the kind of woman to fascinate Burns." 
Fascinated he certainly was. On the 30th December he 
writes: "Almighty love still reigns and revels in my bos- 
om, and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a 
young Edinburgh widow, who has wit and wisdom more 
murderously fatal than the assassinating stiletto of the Si- 
cilian bandit, or the poisoned arrow of the savage African." 
For several months his visits to her house were frequent, 
his letters unremitting. The sentimental correspondence 
which they began, in which Burns addresses her as Clarin- 
da, assuming to himself the name of Sylvander, has been 
published separately, and become notorious. Though this 
correspondence may contain, as Lockhart says, " passages 



IV.] SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 83 

of deep and noble feeling, which no one but Burns could 
have penned," it cannot be denied that it contains many 
more of such fustian, such extravagant bombast, as Burns 
or any man beyond twenty might well have been ashamed 
to write. One could w^ish that for the poet's sake this 
correspondence had never been preserved. It is so humil- 
iating to read this torrent of falsetto sentiment now, and 
to think that a man gifted like Burns should have poured 
it forth. How far his feelings towards Clarinda were 
sincere, or how far they were wrought up to amuse his va- 
cancy by playing at love-making, it is hard to say. Blend- 
ed with a profusion of forced compliments and unreal rapt- 
ures, there are expressions in Burns's letters which one can- 
not but believe that he meant in earnest, at the moment 
when he wrote them. Glarinda, it would seem, must have 
regarded Burns as a man wholly disengaged, and have 
looked forward to the possible removd of Mr. M'Lehose, 
and wdth him of the obstacle to a union with Burns. How 
far he may have really shared the same hopes it is impos- 
sible to say. We only know that he used again and again 
language of deepest devotion, vowing to " love Clarinda to 
death, through death, and for ever." 

While this correspondence between Sylvander and Cla- 
rinda was in its highest flight of rapture. Burns received, 
in January or February, 1788, news from Mauchline which 
greatly agitated him. His renewed intercourse with Jean 
Armour had resulted in consequences which again stirred 
her father's indignation ; this time so powerfully, that he 
turned his daughter to the door. Burns provided a shel- 
ter for her under the roof of a friend ; but for a time he 
does not seem to have thou2;ht of doing more than this. 
Whether he regarded the original private marriage as en- 
tirely dissolved, and looked on himself as an unmarried 



8t ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

man, does not quite appear. Anyhow, he and Clarinda, 
who knew all that had passed with regard to Jean Armour, 
seem to have then thought that enough had been done 
for the seemingly discarded Mauchline damsel, and to have 
carried on their correspondence as rapturously as ever for 
fully another six w^eks, until the 21st of March (l788). 
On that day Sylvander wrote to Clarinda a final letter, 
pledging himself to everlasting love, and following it by a 
copy of verses beginning — 

"Fair empress of the poet's soul," 

presenting her at the same time with a pair of wine-glasses 
as a parting gift. 

On the 24th of Marchj he turned his back on Edinburgh, 
and never returned to it for more than a day's visit. 

Before leaving town, however, he had arranged three 
pieces of business, aJl bearing closely on his future life. 
First, he had secured for himself an appointment in the 
Excise through the kindness of " Lang Sandy Wood," the 
surgeon who attended him when laid up with a bruised 
limb, and who had interceded with Mr. Graham of Fintray, 
the chief of the Excise Board, on Burns's behalf. When 
he received his appointment, he wrote to Miss Chalmers, 
" I have chosen this, my dear friend, after mature delibera- 
tion. The question is not at what door of fortune's palace 
shall we enter in, but what doors does she open for us. I 
was not likely to get anything to do. I got this without 
hanging- on, or mortifying solicitation; it is immediate 
bread, and though poor in comparison of the last eighteen 
months of my existence, 'tis luxury in comparison of all 
my preceding life." 

Next, he had concluded a bargain with Mr. Miller of 
Dalswinton, to lease his farm of Ellisland, on which he 



rv.] SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 85 

had long set his heart, and to which lie had paid sev^eral 
visits in order to inspect it. 

Lastly, he had at last obtained a business settlement 
with Creech regarding the Second Edition of his Poems. 
Before this was effected, Burns had more than once lost 
his temper, and let Creech know his mind. Various ac- 
counts have been given of the profits that now accrued to 
Burns from the whole transaction. We cannot be far 
wrong in taking the estimate at which Dr. Chambers ar- 
rived, for on such a matter he could speak with authority. 
He sets down the poet's profits at as nearly as possible 
500Z. Of this sum Burns gave 180^. to his brother Gil- 
bert, who was now in pecuniary trouble. " I give myself 
no airs on this," he writes, "for it was mere selfishness 
on my part ; I was conscious that the wrong scale of the 
balance was pretty heavily charged, and I thought that 
throwing a little filial piety and fraternal affection into the 
scale in my favour, might help to smooth matters at the 
grand reckoning." This money was understood by the 
family to be the provision due from Robert on behalf of 
his mother, the support of whom he was, now that he was 
setting up for himself, about to throw on his younger 
brother. Chambers seems to reckon that as another 120/. 
must have been spent by Burns on his tours, his accident, 
and his sojourn in Edinburgh since October, he could not 
have more than 200/. over, with which to set up at Ellis- 
land. We see in what terms Burns had written- to Cla- 
rinda on the 21st of March. On his leaving Edinburgh 
and returning to Ayrshire, he married Jean Armour, and 
forthwith acknowledged her in letters as his wife. This 
was in April, though it was not till August that he and 
Jean appeared before the Kirk-Session, and were formally 
recognized as man and wife by the Church. 



86 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

Whether, in taking this step, Burns thought that he was 
carrying out a legal, as well as a moral, obligation, we 
know not. The interpreters of the law now assert that 
the original marriage in 1786 had never been dissolved, 
and that the destruction of the promissory lines, and the 
temporary disownment of him by Jean and her family, 
could not in any way invalidate it. Indeed, after all that 
had happened, for Burns to have deserted Jean, and mar- 
ried another, even if he legally could have done so, would 
have been the basest infidelity. Amid all his other errors 
and inconsistencies — and no doubt there were enough of 
these — we cannot but be glad for the sake of his good 
name that he now acted the part of an honest man, and 
did what he could to repair the much suffering and shame 
he had brought on his frail but faithful Jean. 

As to the reasons which determined Burns to marry 
Jean Armour, and not another, this is the account he him- 
self gives when writing to Mrs. Dunlop, one of his most 
trusted correspondents, to whom he spoke out his real 
heart in a simpler, more natural way, than was usual with 
hiin in letter- writing : 

" You are right that a bachelor state would have ensured 
me more friends ; but, from a cause you will easily guess, 
conscious peace in the enjoyment of my own mind, and 
unmistrusting confidence in approaching my God, would 
seldom have been of the number. I found a once much- 
loved, and still much-loved, female, literally and truly cast 
out to the mercy of the naked elements; but I enabled 
her to purchase a shelter; — there is no sporting with a 
fellow-creature's happiness or misery. The most placid 
good-nature and sweetness of disposition ; a warm heart, 
gratefully devoted with all its powers to love me ; vigorous 
health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the" best ad- 



IV.] SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 87 

vantage by a more than commonly handsome figure : these, 
I think, in a woman may make a good wife, though she 
should never have read a page but the Scriptures of the 
Old and New Testament, nor have danced in a brighter 
assembly than a penny pay wedding." 

To Miss Chalmers he says : 

" I have married my Jean. I had a long and much- 
loved fellow-creature's happiness or misery in my determi- 
nation, and I durst not trifle w ith so important a deposit, 
nor have I any cause to repent it. If I have not got polite 
tittle-tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I am not 
sickened and disquieted with the multiform curse of board- 
ing-school affectation ; and I have got the handsomest fig- 
ure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the 
kindest heart in the country. ... A certain late publica- 
tion of Scots poems she has perused very devoutly, and all 
the ballads in the country, as she has the finest wood-note 
wild I ev^er heard." 

There have been many comments on this turning-point 
in Burns's life. Some have given him high praise for it, 
as though he had done a heroic thing in voluntarily sac- 
rificing himself, when it might have been open to him to 
form a much higher connexion. But all such praise seems 
entirely thrown away. It was not, as it appears, open to 
him to form any other marriage legally ; certainly it was 
not open to him morally. The remark of Lockhart is en- 
tirely true, that, " had he hesitated to make her his wife, 
whom he loved, and who was the mother of his children, 
he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruflBan." 
Lockhart need hardly have added, " or into that misery of 
miseries, the remorse of a poet." 

But even had law and morality allowed him to pass by 
Jean — wliich they did not — would it have been well for 



88 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

Burns, if he had sought, as one of his biographers regrets 
that he had not done, a wife among ladies of higher rank 
and more refined manners? That he could appreciate what 
these things imply, is evident from his own confession in 
looking back on his introduction to what is called socie- 
ty : "A refined and accomplished woman was a being alto- 
gether new to me, and of which I had formed a very inade- 
quate idea." It requires but little knowledge of the world 
and its ways to see the folly of all such regrets. Great 
disparity of condition in marriage seldom answers. And 
in the case of a wayward, moody man, with the pride, the 
poverty, and the irregularities of Burns, and the drudging 
toil which must needs await his wife, it is easy to see what 
misery such a marriage would have stored up for both. 
As it was, the marriage he made was, to put it at the low- 
est, one of the most prudent acts of his life. Jean proved 
to be all, and indeed more than all, he anticipates in the 
letters above given. During the eight years of their mar- 
ried life, according to all testimony, she did her part as a 
wife and mother with the most patient and placid fidelity, 
and bore the trials which her husband's irregular habits en- 
tailed on her, with the utmost long-suffering. And after 
his death, during her long widowhood, she revered his 
memory, and did her utmost to maintain the honour of 
his name. 

With his marriage to his Ayrshire wife. Burns had bid 
farewell to Edinburgh, and to whatever high hopes it may 
have at any time kindled within him, and had returned to 
a condition somewhat nearer to that in which he was born. 
With what feelings did he pass from this brilliant inter- 
lude, and turn the corner which led him back to the dreary 
road of commonplace drudgery, which he hoped to have 
escaped ? There can be little doubt that his feelings were 



IT.] SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 8'.) 

those of bitter disappointment. There had been, it is said, 
a marked contrast between the reception he had met with 
durino^ his first and second winters in Edinburo-h. As 
Allan Cunningham says, " On his first appearance the 
doors of the nobility opened spontaneously, ' on golden 
hinges turning,' and he ate spiced meats and drank rare 
wines, interchanging nods and smiles with high dukes and 
mighty earls. A colder reception awaited his second com- 
ing. The doors of lords and ladies opened with a tardy 
courtesy ; he was received with a cold and measured state- 
liness, was seldom requested to stop, seldomer to repeat 
his visit ; and one of his companions used to relate with 
what indignant feeling the poet recounted his fruitless 
calls and his uncordial receptions in the good town of Ed- 
inburgh. . . . He went to Edinburgh strong in the belief 
that genius such as his would raise him in society ; he re- 
turned not without a sourness of spirit and a bitterness of 
feeling." 

When he did give vent to his bitterness, it was not into 
man's, but into woman's sympathetic ear that he poured 
his complaint. It is thus he writes, some time after set- 
tling at Ellisland, to Mrs. Dunlop, showing how fresh was 
still the wound within. " When I skulk into a corner 
lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead should 
mangle me in the mire, I am tempted to exclaim, ' What 
merits has he had, or what demerit have I had, in some 
previous state of existence, that he is ushered into this 
state of being with the sceptre of rule, and the keys of 
riches in his puny fist, and I am kicked into the world, 
the sport of folly, or the victim of pride ? . . . Often as 
I have glided with humble stealth through the pomp of 
Princes Street, it has suggested itself to me, as an im- 
provement on the present human figure, that a man, in 

5 



90 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

proportion to his own conceit of his own consequence in 
the world, could have pushed out the longitude of his 
common size, as a snail pushes out his horns, or as we 
draw out a prospect-glass.' " 

This is a feeling which Burns has uttered in many a 
form of prose and verse, but which probably never pos- 
sessed hira more bitterly than when he retired from Edin- 
burgh. Many persons in such circumstances may have felt 
thoughts of this kind pass over them for a moment. But 
they have felt ashamed of them as they rose, and have at 
once put them by. Burns no doubt had a severer trial in 
this way than most, but he never could overcome it, never 
ceased to chafe at that inequality of conditions which is 
so strongly fixed in the system in which we find ourselves. 

It was natural that he should have felt some bitterness 
at the changed countenance which Edinburgh society 
turned on him, and it is easy to be sarcastic on the upper 
ranks of that day for turning it: but were they really so 
much to blame ? There are many cases under the present 
order of things, in which we are constrained to say, " It 
must needs be that offences come." Taking men and 
things as they are, could it well have been otherwise ? 

First, the novelty of Burns's advent had worn off by his 
second winter in Edinburgh, and, though it may be a 
weakness, novelty always counts for something in human 
affairs. Then, again, the quiet, decorous men of Blair's 
circle knew more of Burns's ways and doings than at first, 
and what they came to know was not likely to increase 
their desire for intimacy with him. It was, it seems, no- 
torious that Burns kept that formidable memorandum- 
book already alluded to, in which he was supposed to 
sketch with unsparing hand, "stem likenesses" of his 
friends and benefactors. So little of a secret did he make 



iv.] SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH. ni 

of this, that we are told he sometimes allowed a visitor to 
have a look at the figures which he had sketched in his 
portrait-gallery. The knowledge that such a book existed 
was not likely to make Blair and his friends more desirous 
of his society. 

Again, the festivities at the Crochallan Club and other 
such haunts, the habits he there indulged in, and the as- 
sociates with whom he consorted, these were well known. 
And it was not possible that either the ways, the conver- 
sation, or the cronies of the Crochallan Club could be wel- 
comed in quieter and more polished circles. Men of the 
Ainslie and Nicol stamp would hardly have been quite in 
place there. 

Again — what is much to the honour of Burns — he nev- 
ei', in the highest access of his fame, abated a jot of his 
intimacy and friendship towards the men of his own rank, 
with whom he had been associated in his days of obscu- 
rity. These were tradesmen, farmers, and peasants. The 
thought of them, their sentiments, their prejudices and 
habits, if it had been possible, their very persons, he would 
have taken with him, without disguise or apology, into the 
highest circles of rank or of literature. But this might 
not be. It was impossible that Burns could take Mauch- 
line with its belles, its Poosie-Nansies and its Souter John- 
nies, bodily into the library of Dr. Blair or the drawing- 
room of Gordon Castle. 

A man, to whom it is open, must make his choice ; but 
he cannot live at once in two different and widely sundered 
orders of society. To no one is it given, not even to men 
of genius great as that of Burns, for himself and his fam- 
ily entirely to overleap the barriers with which custom and 
the world have hedged us in, and to weld the extremes of 



92 ROBERT BURN!^. [chap. 

society into one. To the speculative as well as to the 
practically humane man, the great inequality in human 
conditions presents, no doubt, a perplexing problem. A 
little less worldly pride, and a little more Christian wisdom 
and humility, would probably have helped Burns to solve 
it better than he did. But besides the social grievance, 
which though impalpable is very real, Burns had another 
more material and tangible. The great whom he had met 
in Edinburgh, whose castles he had visited in the country, 
might have done something to raise him at once above 
poverty and toil, and they did little or nothing. They 
had, indeed, subscribed liberally for his Second Edition, and 
they had got him a ganger's post, with fifty or sixty pounds 
a year — that was all. What more could they, ought they 
to have done? To have obtained him an office in some 
one of the higher professions was not to be thought of, 
for a man cannot easily, at the age of eight-and-twenty, 
change his whole line and adapt himself to an entirely 
new employment. The one thing they might have com- 
bined to do, was to have compelled Dundas, or some other 
of the men then in power, to grant Burns a pension from 
the public purse. That was the day of pensions, and hun- 
dreds with no claim to compare with Burns's were then 
on the pension list : 300^. a year would have sufficed to 
place him in comfort and independence ; and could public 
money have been better spent ? But though the most rig- 
id economist might not have objected, would Burns have 
accepted such a benefaction, had it been offered ? And if 
he had accepted it, would he not have chafed under the 
obligation, more even than he did in the absence of it? 
Such questions as these cannot but arise, as often as we 
think over the fate of Burns, and ask ourselves if nothing 



IV.] SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 93 

could have been done to avert it. Though natural, they 
are vain. Things hold on their own course to their inev- 
itable issues, and Burns left Edinburgh, and set his face 
first towards Ayrshire, then to Nithsdale, a saddened and 
embittered man. 



CHAPTER V. 



LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 



*' Mr. Burns, you have made a poet's not a farmer's 
choice." Such was the remark of Allan Cunningham's 
father, land-steward to the laird of Dalswinton, when the 
poet turned from the low-lying and fertile farm of Fore- 
girth, which Cunningham had recommended to him, and 
selected for his future home the farm of EUisland. He 
was taken by the beautiful situation and fine romantic out- 
look of the poorest of several farms on the Dalswinton 
estate which were in his option. EUisland lies on the 
western bank of the River Nith, about six miles above 
Dumfries. Looking from P^llisland eastward across the 
river, "a pure stream running there over the purest grav- 
el," you see the rich holms and noble woods of Dalswin- 
ton. Dalswinton is an ancient historic place, which has 
even within recorded memory more than once changed its 
mansion-house and .its proprietor. To the west the eye 
falls on the hills of Dunscore, and looking northward up 
the Nith, the view is bounded by the heights that shut in 
the river towards Drumlanrig, and by the high conical hill 
of Corsincon, at the base of which the infant stream slips 
from the shire of Ayr into that of Dumfries. The farm- 
steading of EUisland stands but a few yards to the west of 
the Nith. Immediately underneath there is a red scaur of 
considerable height, overhanging the stream, and the rest 



CHAP, v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAXD. 95 

of the bank is covered witli broom, through which winds a 
greensward path, whither Burns used to retire to meditate 
his songs. The farm extends to upwards of a hundred 
acres, part holm, part croft-land, of which the former yield- 
ed good wheat, the latter oats and potatoes. The lease 
was for nineteen years, and the rent fifty pounds for the 
first three years ; seventy for the rest of the tack. The 
laird of Dalswinton, while Burns leased Ellisland, was Mr. 
Patrick Millar, not an ordinary laird, but one w^ell known 
in his day for his scientific discoveries. There was no 
proper farm-house or oflSces on the farm — it was part of 
the bargain that Burns should build these for himself. The 
want of a house made it impossible for him to settle at 
once on his farm. His bargain for it had been concluded 
early in March (1*788); but it was not till the 13th of 
June that he went to reside at Ellisland. In the interval 
between these two dates he went to Ayrshire, and com- 
pleted privately, as we have seen, the marriage, the long- 
postponement of which had caused him so much disquiet. 
With however great disappointment and chagrin he may 
have left Edinburgh, the sense that he had now done the 
thing that was riglit, and had the prospect of a settled life 
before him, gave him for a time a peace and even gladness 
of heart, to which he had for long been a stranger. We 
can, therefore, well believe what he tells us, that, when he 
had left Edinburgh, he journeyed towards Mauchline with 
as much gaiety of heart " as a May-frog, leaping across the 
newly-harrowed ridge, enjoying the fragrance of the re- 
freshed earth after the long-expected shower." Of what 
may be called the poet's marriage settlement, we have the 
followino- details from Allan Cunnino-ham : 

" His marriage reconciled the poet to his wife's kin- 
dred: there was no wedding portion. Armour was a 



9P» ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

respectable man, but not opulent. He gave his daughter 
some small store of plenishing; and, exerting his skill as a 
mason, wrought his already eminent son-in-law a hand- 
some punch-bowl in Inverary marble, which Burns lived to 
fill often, to the great pleasure both of himself and his 
friends. . . . Mrs. Dunlop bethought herself of Ellisland, 
and gave a beautiful heifer; another friend contributed a 
plough. The young couple, from love to their native 
county, ordered their furniture from a wright in Maucli- 
line ; the farm - servants, male and female, were hired in 
Ayrshire, a matter of questionable prudence, for the mode 
of cultivation is different from that of the west, and the 
cold, humid bottom of Mossgiel bears no resemblance to 
the warm and stony loam of Ellisland." 

When on the 13th June he went to live on his farm, he 
had, as there was no proper dwelling-house on it, to leave 
Jean and her one surviving child behind him at Mauch- 
line, and himself to seek shelter in a mere hovel on the 
skirts of the farm. " I remember the house well," says 
Cunningham, " the floor of clay, the rafters japanned with 
soot, the smoke from a hearth-fire streamed thickly out 
at door and window, while the sunshine which struggled 
in at those apertures produced a sort of twilight." Burns 
thus writes to Mrs. Dunlop, "A solitary inmate of an old 
smoky spence, far from every object I love or by whom 
I am beloved ; nor any acquaintance older than yesterday, 
except Jenny Geddes, the old mare I ride on, while uncouth 
cares and novel plans hourly insult my awkward ignorance 
and bashful inexperience." It takes a more even, better- 
ordered spirit than Burns's to stand such solitude. His 
heart, during those first weeks at Ellisland, entirely sank 
within him, and he saw all men and life coloured by his 
own despondency. This is the entry in his commonplace 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 97 

book on the first Sunday he spent alone at EUisland: — ''I 
am such a coward in life, so tired of the service, that I 
would almost at any time, with Milton's Adam, 'gladly 
lay me in my mother's lap, and be at peace.' But a wife 
and children bind me to struggle with the stream, till 
some sudden squall shall overset the silly vessel, or in the 
listless return of years its own craziness reduce it to 
wreck." 

The discomfort of his dwelling-place made him not 
only discontented with his lot, but also with the people 
amongst whom he found himself. " I am here," he writes, 
" on my farm ; but for all the pleasurable part of life called 
social comcQunication, I am at the very elbow of exist- 
ence. The only things to be found in perfection in this 
country are stupidity and canting. ... As for the Muses, 
they have as much idea of a rhinoceros as a poet." 

When he was not in Ayrshire in bodily presence, he 
was there in spirit. It was at such a time that, looking 
up to the hills that divide Nithsdale from Ayrshire, he 
breathed to his wife that most natural and beautiful of all 
his love-lyrics — 

" Of a' the airts the wind can blaw 
I dearly like the west, 
For there the bonnie lassie lives, 
The lassie I lo'e best." 

His disparagement of Nithsdale people, Allan Cunning- 
ham, himself a Dumfriesshire man, naturally resents, and 
accounts for it by supposing that the sooty hovel had in- 
fected his whole mental atmosphere. " The Maxwells, the 
Kirkpatricks, and Dalzells," exclaims honest Allan, " were 
fit companions for any man in Scotland, and they were 
almost his neighbours ; Riddell of Friars Carse, an accom- 
plished antiquarian, lived almost next door; and Jean 

5* 



98 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

Lindsay and her husband, Patrick Millar, the laird of 
Dalswinton, were no ordinary people. The former, beau- 
tiful, accomplished, a writer of easy and graceful verses, 
with a natural dignity of manners which became her 
station ; the latter an improver and inventor, the first who 
applied steam to the purposes of navigation," But Burns's 
hasty judgments of men and things, the result of moment- 
ary feeling, are not to be too literally construed. 

He soon found that there was enough of sociality 
among all ranks of Dumfriesshire people, from the laird 
to the cotter, indeed, more than was good for himself. 
Yet, however much he may have complained, when writ- 
ing letters to his correspondents of an evening, he was too 
manly to go moping about all day long when there was 
work to be done. He was, moreover, nerved to the task 
by the thought that he was preparing the home that was 
to shelter his wife and children. On the laying of the 
foundation-stone of his future house, he took off his hat 
and asked a blessing on it. " Did he ever put his own 
hand to the work ?" was asked of one of the men engaged 
in it. "Ay, that he did, mony a time," was the answer; 
" if he saw us like to be beat wi' a big stane, he would 
cry, * Bide a wee,' and come rinning. We soon found out 
when he put to his hand, he beat a' I ever met for a dour 
lift." 

During his first harvest, though the weather was un- 
favourable, and the crop a poor one, we find Burns speak- 
ing in his letters of being industriously employed, and 
binding every day after the reapers. But Allan Cunning- 
ham's father, who had every opportunity of observing, 
used to allege that Burns seemed to him like a restless 
and unsettled man. " He was ever on the move, on foot 
or on horseback. In the course of a single day he might 



V.J LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 99 

be seen holding the plough, angling in the river, saun- 
tering, with his hands behind his back, on the banks, 
looking at the running water, of which he was very fond, 
walking round his buildings or over his fields ; and if you 
lost sight of him for an hour, perhaps you might see him 
returning from Friars Carse, or spurring his horse through 
the hills to spend an evening in some distant place with 
such friends as chance threw in his way." Before his 
new house was ready, he had many a long ride to and 
fro through the Cumnock hills to Mauchline, to visit Jean, 
and to return. It was not till the first week of Decem- 
ber, 1788, that his lonely bachelor life came to an end, 
and that he was able to bring his wife and household to 
Nithsdale. Even then the house at Ellisland was not 
ready for his reception, and he and his family had to put 
up for a time in a neighbouring farm-house called the Isle. 
They brought with them two farm -lads from Ayrshire, 
and a servant lass called Elizabeth Smith, who w^as alive 
in 1851, and gave Chambers many details of the poet's 
^way of life at Ellisland. Among these she told him that 
her father was so concerned about her moral welfare that, 
before allowing her to go, he made Burns promise to keep 
a strict watch over her behaviour, and to exercise her duly 
in the Shorter Catechism ; and that both of these promises 
he faithfully fulfilled. 

The advent of his wife and his child in the dark days 
of the year kept dulness aloof, and made him meet the 
coming of the new year (1789) with more cheerful hopes 
and calmer spirits than he had known for long. Alas, 
that these were doomed to be so short-lived ! 

On New-Year's morning, 1789, his brother Gilbert thus 
affectionately writes to the poet : " Dear Brother, — I have 
just finished my New-Year's Day breakfast in the usual 



100 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

form, which naturally makes me call to mind the days of 
former years, and the society in which we used to begin 
them ; and when I look at our family vicissitudes, ' through 
the dark postern of time long elapsed,' I cannot help re- 
marking to you, my dear brother, how good the God of 
seasons is to us, and that, however some clouds may seem 
to lower over the portion of time before us, we have great 
reason to hope that all will turn out well." On the same 
New- Year's Day Burns addressed to Mrs. Dunlop a letter, 
which, though it has been often quoted, is too pleasing to 
be omitted here. *' I own myself so little a Presbyterian, 
that I approve set times and seasons of more than ordinary 
acts of devotion for breaking in on that habituated routine 
"of life and thought, which is so apt to reduce our existence 
to a kind of instinct, or even sometimes, and with some 
minds, to a state very little superior to mere machinery. 
This day — the first Sunday of May — a breezy, blue-skied 
noon some time about the beginning, and a hoary morning 
and calm sunny day about the end, of autumn — these, time 
out of mind, have been with me a kind of holiday. . . . 
We know nothing, or next to nothing, of the substance or 
structure of our souls, so cannot account for those seeming 
caprices in them, that we should be particularly pleased 
with this thing, or struck with that, which on minds of a 
different cast makes no extraordinary impression. I have 
some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the 
mountain-daisy, the harebell, the fox-glove, the wild-brier 
rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I 
view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear 
the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, 
or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in 
an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul 
like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my 






v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAXD. 101 

dear friend, to what can this Lc owing? Arc we a piece 
of machinery, which, like the ^Eolian harp, passive, takes 
the impression of the passing accident? Or do these 
workings argue something within us above the trodden 
clod ? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful 
and important realities — a God that made all things — 
man's immaterial and immortal nature — and a world of 
weal or woe beyond death and the grave !" 

On reading this beautiful and suggestive letter, an orni- 
thologist remaj'ked that Burns had made a mistake in a 
fact of natural history. It is not the 'gray plover,' but 
the golden, whose music is heard on the moors in autumn. 
The gray plover, our accurate observer remarks, is a win- 
ter shore bird, found only at that season and in that hab- 
itat, in this country. 

It was not till about the middle of 1789 that the farm- 
house of Ellisland was finished, and that he and his family, 
leaving the Isle, went to live in it. When all was ready. 
Burns bade his servant, Betty Smith, take a bowl of salt, 
and place the Family Bible on the top of it, and, bearing 
these, walk first into the new house and possess it. He 
himself, with his wife on his arm, followed Betty and the 
Bible and the salt, and so they entered their new abode. 
Burns delighted to keep up old-world freits or usages like 
this. It was either on this occasion, or on his bringing 
Mrs. Burns to the Isle, that he held a house-heating men- 
tioned by Allan Cunningham, to which all the neighbour- 
hood gathered, and drank, " Luck to the roof-tree of the 
house of Burns !" The farmers and the well-to-do peo- 
ple welcomed him gladly, and were proud that such a 
man had come to be a dweller in their vale. Yet the 
ruder country lads and the lower peasantry, we are told, 
looked on him not without dread, " lest he should pickle 



102 ROBERT BURNS. [(hap. 

and preserve them in sarcastic song." "Once at a penny 
wedding, when one or two wild young lads quarrelled, and, 
were about to fight. Burns rose up and said, ' Sit down 

and , or else I'll hang you up like potato-bogles in 

sang to-morrow.' They ceased, and sat down as if their 
noses had been bleeding." 

The house which had cost Burns so much toil in build- 
ing, and which he did not enter till about the middle of 
the year 1789, was a humble enough abode. Only a large 
kitchen, in which the whole family, master and servants, 
took their meals together, a room to hold two beds, a 
closet to hold one, and a garret, coom-ceiled, for the fe- 
male servants, this made the whole dwelling-house. " One 
of the windows looked southward down the holms; an- 
other opened on the river; and the house stood so near 
the lofty bank, that its afternoon shadow fell across the 
stream, on the opposite fields. The garden or kail-yard 
was a little way from the house. A pretty footpath led 
southward along the river side, another ran northward, af- 
fording fine views of the Nith, the woods of Friars Carse, 
and the grounds of Dalswinton. Half-way down the 
steep declivity, a fine clear cool spring supplied water to 
the household." Such was the first home which Burns 
found for himself and his wife, and the best they were 
ever destined to find. The months spent in the Isle, and 
the few that followed the settlement at Ellisland, were 
among the happiest of his life. Besides trying his best 
to set himself to farm-industry, he was otherwise bent on 
well-doing. He had, soon after his arrival in Ellisland, 
started a parish library, both for his own use and to 
spread a love of literature among his neighbours, the 
portioners and peasants of Dunscore. When he first took 
up house at Ellisland, he used every evening when he was 



V.J LIFE AT ELuLSLAXD. 103 

at Lome, to gather Ids household for family worship, and, 
after the old Scottish custom, himself to offer up prayer 
in his own words. He was regular, if not constant, in his 
attendance at the parish church of Dunscore, in which a 
worthy minister, Mr. Kirkpatrick, officiated, whom he re- 
spected for his character, though he sometimes demurred 
to w^hat seemed to him the too great sternness of his 
doctrine. 

Burns and his wife had not been long settled in their 
newly - built far^m - house, when prudence induced him to 
ask that he might be appointed Excise officer in the dis- 
trict in which he lived. This request Mr. Graham of 
Fintray, who had placed his name on the Excise list before 
he left Edinburgh, at once granted. The reasons that im- 
pelled Burns to this step were the increase of his family 
by the birth of a son in August, 1789, and the prospect 
that his second year's harvest would be a failure like the 
first. He often repeats that it was solely to make pro- 
vision for his increasing family that he submitted to the 
degradation of — 

" Searching auld wives' barrels — 

Och, hon ! the day ! 
That clarty barm should stain my laurels, 

But — what 'ill ye say ? 
These movin things, ca'd wives and weans, 
Wad move the very hearts o' stanes." 

That he felt keenly the slur that attached to the name 
of ganger is certain, but it is honourable to him that he 
resolved bravely to endure it for the sake of his family. 

" I know not," he writes, " how the word exciseman, or 
the still more opprobrious ganger, will sound in your ears. 
I, too, have seen the day when my auditory nerves would 
have felt very delicately on this subject; but a wife and 



104 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

cliildren are things which have a wonderful power in 
blunting this kind of sensations. Fifty pounds a year 
for life, and a provision for widows and orphans, you will 
allow, is no bad settlement for a poet." 

In announcing to Dr. Blactlock his new employment, 
he says — 

" But what d'ye think, my trusty fier, 
I'm turned a ganger — Peace be here ! 
Parnassian queans, I fear, I fear, 

Ye'll now disdain me ! 
And then my fifty pounds a year 
Will little gain me. 
***** 
" Ye ken, ye ken 
That Strang necessity supreme is 
'Mang sons o' men. 
I hae a wife and twa wee laddies, 
They maun hae brose and brats o' duddies ; 
Ye ken yoursels my heart right proud is, 

I need na vaunt. 
But I'll sned besoms, thraw saugh woodies. 
Before they want." 

He would cut brooms and twist willow-ropes before his 
children should want. But perhaps, as the latest editor of 
Burns's poems observes, his best saying on the subject of 
the excisemanship was that word to Lady Glencairn, the 
mother of his patron, " I would much rather have it said 
that my profession borrowed credit from me, than that I 
borrowed it from my profession." 

In these words we see something of the bitterness about 
his new employment, which often escaped from him, both 
in prose and verse. Nevertheless, having undertaken it, 
he set his face honestly to the work. He had to survey 
ten parishes, covering a tract of not less than fifty miles 
each way, and requiring him to ride two hundred miles 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 105 

a week. Smuggling was then common throughout Scot- 
land, both in the shape of brewing and of selling beer 
and whiskey without licence. Burns took a serious yet 
humane view of his duty. To the regular smuggler he is 
said to have been severe ; to the country folk, farmers or 
cotters, who sometimes transgressed, he tempered justice 
with mercy. Many stories are told of his leniency to 
these last. At Thornhill, on a fair day, he was seen to 
call at the door of a poor woman who for the day was 
doing a little illicit business on her own account. A nod 
and a movement of the forefinger brought the woman to 
the doorway. " Kate, are you mad ? Don't you know 
that the supervisor and I will be in upon you in forty 
minutes?" Burns at once disappeared among the crowd, 
and the poor woman was saved a heavy fine. Another 
day the poet and a brother ganger entered a widow's 
house at Dunscore and seized a quantity of smuggled to- 
bacco." "Jenny," said Burns, "I expected this would be 
the upshot. Here, Lewars, take note of the number of 
rolls as I count them. Now, Jock, did you ever hear an 
auld wife numbering her threads before check-reels were 
invented ? Thou's ane, and thou's no ane, and thou's ane 
a' out — listen." As he handed out the rolls, and num- 
bered them, old-wife fashion, he dropped every other roll 
into Jenny's lap. Lewars took the desired note with be- 
coming gravity, and saw as though he saw not. Again, 
a woman who had been brewing, on seeing Burns coming 
with another exciseman, slipped out by the back door, 
leaving a servant and a little girl in the house. "Has 
there been ony brewing for the fair here the day ?" " O 
no, sir, we hae nae licence for that," answered the serv- 
ant maid. " That's no true," exclaimed the child ; " the 
muckle black kist is fou' o' the bottles o' yill that my 



106 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

mither sat up a' nicht brewing for the fair." ..." We are 
in a hurry just now," said Burns, " but when we return 
from the fair, we'll examine the muckle black kist." In 
acts like these, and in many another anecdote that might be 
given, is seen the genuine human-heartedness of the man, 
in strange contrast with the bitternesses which so often 
find vent in his letters. Ultimately, as we shall see, the 
exciseman's work told heavily against his farming, his 
poetry, and his habits of life. But it was some time be- 
fore this became apparent. The solitary rides through 
the moors and dales that border Nithsdale gave him op- 
portunities, if not for composing long poems, at any rate 
for crooning over those short songs in which mainly his 
genius now found vent. " The visits of the muses to me," 
he writes, "and I believe to most of their acquaintance, 
like the visits of good angels, are short and far between ; 
but I meet them now and then as I jog through the hills 
of Nithsdale, just as I used to do on the banks of Ayr." 

Take as a sample some of the varying moods he passed 
through in the summer and autumn of 1789. In the 
May-time of that year an incident occurs, which the poet 
thus describes : — " One morning lately, as I was out pret- 
ty early in the fields, sowing some grass-seeds, I heard the 
burst of a shot from a neighbouring plantation, and pres- 
ently a poor little wounded hare came hirpling by me. 
You will guess my indignation at the inhuman fellow who 
could shoot a hare at this season, when all of them have 
young ones. Indeed, there is something in the business of 
destroying, for our sport, individuals in the animal crea- 
tion that do not injure us materially, which I could never 
reconcile to my ideas of virtue." The lad who fired the 
shot and roused the poet's indignation, was the son of a 
neighbouring farmer. Burns cursed him, and, being near 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 107 

the Nith at the time, threatened to throw him into tne 
river. He found, however, a more innocent vent for his 
feelings in the following lines : 

" Inhuman man ! curse on thy barbarous art, 
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye ! 
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh, 
Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart ! 

" Go live, poor wanderer of the wood and field, 
The bitter little that of life remains : 
No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains 
To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield. 

" Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest, 
No more of rest, but now thy dying bed ! 
The sheltering rushes whistling o'er thy head, 
The cold earth with thy bloody bosom prest. 

"Perhaps a mother's anguish adds its woe; 
The playful pair crowd fondly by thy side ; 
Ah ! helpless nurslings, who will now provide 
That life a mother only can bestow ! 

" Oft as by winding Nith, I, musing, wait 
The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn, 
I'll miss thee sporting o'er the dewy lawn. 
And curse the ruffian's aim, and mourn thy hapless fate." 

This, which is one of the best of the very few good poems 
which Burns composed in classical English, is no mere sen- 
timental effusion, but expresses what in him was a real part 
of his nature — his tender feeling towards his lower fellow- 
creatures. The same feeling iSnds expression in the lines 
on The Mouse, The Auld Farmer's Address to his Mare, 
and The Winter Night, when, as he sits by his fireside, and 
hears the storm roaring without, he says — 

" I thought me on the ourie cattle. 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 



1U8 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

0' wintry war. 

Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, 

Beneath a scaur. 
» 
Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing. 

That in the merry months o' spring 

Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o' thee ? 
Whare wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, 

And close thy e'e ?" 

Though for a time, influenced by the advice of critics, 
Burns had tried to compose some poems according to the 
approved models of book-English, we find him presently 
reverting to his own Doric, which he had lately too much 
abandoned, and writing in good broad Scotch his admira- 
bly humorous description of Captain Grose, an Antiquary, 
whom he had met at Friars Carse : 

" Hear, Land o' Cakes, and brither Scots, 
Frae Maidenkirk to Johnnie Groats — 
If there's a hole in a' your coats, 

I rede you tent it : 
A chield's amang you, takin' notes. 

And, faith, he'll prent it. 

"■ By some auld, houlet-haunt6d biggin. 
Or kirk deserted by its riggin. 
It's ten to ane ye'll find him snug in 

Some eldritch part, 
Wi' deils, they say. Lord save's ! colleaguin* 

At some black art. 

" It's tauld he was a sodger bred, 
And ane wad rather fa'n than fled ; 
But now he's quat the spurtle-blade, 

And dog-skin wallet. 
And taen the — Antiquarian trade, 

I think they call it. 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 109 

*' He has a fouth o' auld nick-nackets ; 
Rusty aim caps, and jinglin' jackets, 
Wad baud the Lothians three in tackets, 

A towmont gude 
And parritch-pats and auld saut-backets, 
Before the Flood. 
***** 
" Forbye, he'll shape you aff fu' gleg 
The cut of Adam's philibeg ; 
The knife that nicket Abel's craig 

He'll prove you fully, 
It was a faulding jocteleg 

Or lang-kail gullie." 

The meeting with Captain Grose took place in the sum- 
mer of 1789, and the stanzas just given were written prob- 
ably about the same time. To the same date belongs his 
ballad called The Kirk'^s Alarm, in which he once more 
reverts to the defence of one of his old friends of the New 
Light school, who had got into the Church Courts, and 
was in jeopardy from the attacks of his more orthodox 
brethren. The ballad in itself has little merit, except as 
showing that Burns still clung to the same school of di- 
vines to which he had early attached himself. In Septem- 
ber we find him writing in a more serious strain to Mrs. 
Dunlop, and suggesting thoughts which might console her 
in some affliction under which she was suffering. "... In 
vain would we reason and pretend to doubt. I have my- 
self done so to a very daring pitch ; but when I reflected 
that I was opposing the most ardent wishes and the most 
darling hopes of good men, and flying in the face of all 
human belief, in all ages, I was shocked at my own con- 
duct." 

That same September, Burns, with his friend Allan Mas- 
terton, crossed from Nithsdale to Annandale to visit their 



no ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

common friend Nicol, who was spending* his vacation in 
Moffatdale. They met and spent a night in Nicol's lodg- 
ing. It was a small thatched cottage, near Craigieburn — 
a place celebrated by Burns in one of his songs — and 
stands on the right-hand side as the traveller passes up 
Moffatdale to Yarrow, between the road and the river. 
Few pass that way now without having the cottage point- 
ed out as the place where the three merry comrades met 
that night 

" We had such a joyous meeting," Burns writes, " that 
Mr. Masterton and I agreed, each in our own way, that we 
should celebrate the business," and Burns's celebration of 
it was the famous bacchanalian song — 

" 0, Willie brewed a peck o' raaut, 
And Rob and Allan cam to pree." 

If bacchanalian songs are to be written at all, this certain- 
ly must be pronounced " The king amang them a'." But 
while no one can withhold admiration from the genius and 
inimitable humour of the song, still we read it with very 
mingled feelings, when we think that perhaps it may have 
helped some topers since Burns's day a little faster on the 
road to ruin. As for the three boon -companions them- 
selves, just ten years after that night, Currie wrote, " These 
three honest fellows — all men of uncommon talents — are 
now all under the turf." And in 1821, John Struthers, a 
Scottish poet little known, but of great worth and some 
genius, thus recurs to Currie's words : — 

" Nae mail- in learning Willie toils, nor Allan wakes the melting lay, 
Nor Rab, wi' fancy - witching wiles, beguiles the hour o' dawning 

day; 
For tho' they were na very fou, that wicked wee drap in the e'e 
lias done its turn ; untimely now the green grass waves o'er a' 
the three." 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. Ill 

Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut was soon followed by 
another bacchanalian effusion, the ballad called The Whis- 
tle. Three lairds, all neighbours of Burns at Ellisland, met 
at Friars Carse on the 16th of October, 1789, to contend 
with each other in a drinking-bout. The prize was an 
ancient ebony whistle, said to have been brought to Scot- 
land in the reign of James the Sixth by a Dane, who, after 
three days and three nights' contest in hard drinking, was 
overcome by Sir Robert Laurie, of Maxwelton, with whom 
the whistle remained as a trophy. It passed into the Rid- 
dell family, and now in Burns's time it was to be again 
contested for in the same rude orgie. Burns was appoint- 
ed the bard to celebrate the contest. Much discussion has 
been carried on by his biographers as to whether Burns 
was present or not. Some maintain that he sat out the 
drinking-match, and shared the deep potations. Others, 
and among these his latest editor, Mr. Scott Douglas, main- 
tain that he was not present that night in body, but only 
in spirit. Anyhow, the ballad remains a monument, if not 
of his genius, at least of his sympathy with that ancient 
but now happily exploded form of good fellowship. 

This " mighty claret-shed at the Carse," and the ballad 
commemorative of it, belong to the 16th of October, 1789. 
It must have been within a few days of that merry-meet- 
ing that Burns fell into another and very different mood, 
which has recorded itself in an immortal lyric. It would 
seem that from the year 1786 onwards, a cloud of melan- 
choly generally gathered over the poet's soul toward the 
end of each autumn. This O^^tober, as the anniversary of 
Highland Mary's death drew on, he was observed by his 
wife to " grow sad about something, and to wander solita- 
ry on the banks of Nith, and about his farm-yard, in the 
extremest agitation of mind nearly the whole night. He 



112 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

screened himself on the lee-side of a corn-stack from the 
cutting edge of the night wind, and lingered till approach- 
ing dawn wiped out the stars, one by one, from the firma- 
ment." Some more details Lockhart has added, said to 
have been received from Mrs. Burns, but these the latest 
editor regards as mythical. However this may be, it would 
appear that it was only after his wife had frequently en- 
treated him, that he was persuaded to return to his home, 
where he sat down and wrote, as they now stand, these pa- 
thetic lines : 

" Thou lingering star, with lessening ray, 

That lovest to greet the early niom, 
Again thou usherest in the day 

My Mary from my soul was torn. 
Mary ! dear departed shade ! 

Where is thy place of blissful rest ? 
See'st thou thy lover lowly laid ? 

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast ?" 

That Burns should have expressed, in such rapid suc- 
cession, the height of drunken revelry in Willie brewed a 
Feck o' Maut and in the ballad of The Whistle, and then 
the depth of despondent regret in the lines To Maty in 
Heaven, is highly characteristic of him. To have many 
moods belongs to the poetic nature, but no poet ever pass- 
ed more rapidly than Burns from one pole of feeling to 
its very opposite. Such a poem as this last could not 
possibly have proceeded from any but the deepest and 
most genuine feelingo Once again, at the same season, 
three years later (l792), his thoughts went back to High- 
land Mary, and he poured forth his last sad wail for her in 
the simpler, not less touching song, beginning — 

" Ye banks, and braes, and streams around 
The castle o' Montgomery ! 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. il8 

Green be your woods, and fair your flowers, 

Your waters never drumlie ; 
There simmer first unfauld her robes, 

And there the langest tarry ; , 

For there I took the last Fareweel 

0' my sweet Highland Mary." 

It would seem as tliougli these retrospects were always 
accompanied by special despondency. For, at the very 
time he composed this latter song, he wrote thus to his 
faithful friend, Mrs. Dunlop : 

" Alas ! who would wish for many years ? What is it 
but to drag existence until our joys gradually expire, and 
leave us in a night of misery, like the gloom which blots 
out the stars, one by one, from the face of heaven, and 
leaves us without a ray of comfort in the howling waste ?" 

To fits of hypochondria and deep dejection he had, as he 
himself tells us, been subject from his earliest manhood, 
and he attributes to overtoil in boyhood this tendency 
which was probably a part of his natural temperament. 
To a disposition like his, raptures, exaltations, agonies, came 
as naturally as a uniform neutral-tinted existence to more 
phlegmatic spirits. But we may be sure that every cause 
of self-reproach which his past life had stored up in his 
memory tended to keep him more and more familiar with 
the lower pole in that fluctuating scale. 

Besides these several poems which mark the variety of 
moods which swept over him during the summer and au- 
tumn of 1789, there was also a continual succession of 
songs on the anvil in preparation for Johnson's Museum. 
This work of song-making, begun during his second win- 
ter in Edinburgh, was carried on with little intermission 
during all the Ellisland period. The songs were on all 
kinds of subjects, and of all degrees of excellence, but 

6 



114 ROBERT BURNS. [cBap. 

hardly one, even the most trivial, was without some small 
touch which could have come from no hand but that of 
Burns. Sometimes they were old songs with a stanza or 
two added. Oftener an old chorus or single line was tak- 
en up, and made the hint out of which a new and original 
song was woven. At other times they were entirely orig- 
inal both in subject and in expression, though cast in the 
form of the ancient minstrelsy. Among so many and so 
rapidly succeeding efforts, it was only now and then, when 
a happier moment of inspiration was granted him, that 
there came forth one song of supreme excellence, perfect 
alike in conception and in expression. The consummate 
song of this summer (1789) was John Anderson my Joe, 
John, just as Auld Lang Syne and The Silver Tassie had 
been those of the former year. 

During the remainder of the year 1789 Burns seems to 
have continued more or less in the mood of mind indi- 
cated by the lines To Mary in Heaven. He was suffering 
from nervous derangement, and this, as usual with him, 
made him despondent. This is the way in which he writes 
to Mrs. Dunlop on the 13th December, 1789 : 

" I am groaning under the miseries of a diseased ner- 
vous system — a system, the state of which is most condu- 
cive to our happiness, or the most productive of our mis- 
ery. For now near three weeks I have been so ill with 
a nervous headache, that 1 hai^e been obliged for a time 
to give up my Excise-books, 1: eing scarce able to lift my 
head, much less to ride once a week over t«n muir parishes. 
What is man ? . . ." 

And then he goes on to moralize in a half- believing, 
half-doubting kind of way, on the probability of a life to 
come, and ends by speaking of, or rather apostrophizing, 
Jesus Christ in a strain which would seem to savour of So- 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 115 

cinianisra. This letter he calls " a distracted scrawl which 
the writer dare scarcely read." And yet it appears to have 
been deliberately copied with some amplification from an 
entry in his last year's commonplace-book. Even the few 
passages from his correspondence already given are enough 
to show that there was in Burns's letter-writing something 
strained and artificial. But such discoveries as this seem 
to reveal an extent of effort, and even of artifice, which one 
would hardly otherwise have guessed at. 

In the same strain of harassment as the preceding ex- 
tract, but pointing to another and more definite cause of 
it, is the following, written on the 20th December, 1789, to 
Provost Maxwell of Lochmaben : 

" My poor distracted mind is so torn, so jaded, so racked 
and bedevilled with the task of the superlatively damned, 
to make one guinea do the business of three, that I detest, 
abhor, and swoon at the very word business, though no 
less than four letters of my very short surname are in it." 
The rest of the letter goes off in a wild rollicking strain, 
inconsistent enough with his more serious thoughts. But 
the part of it above given points to a very real reason for 
his growing discontent with Ellisland. 

By the beginning of 1790 the hopelessness of his farm- 
ing prospects pressed on him still more heavily, and formed 
one ingredient in the mental depression with which he saw 
a new year dawn. Whether he did wisely in attempting 
the Excise business, who shall now say ? In one respect it 
seemed a substantial gain. But this gain was accompanied 
by counterbalancing disadvantages. The new duties more 
and more withdrew him from the farm, which, in order to 
give it any chance of paying, required not only the aid of 
the master's hand, but the undivided oversight of the mas- 
ter's eye. In fact, farming to profit and Excise-work were 



116 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

incompatible, and a very few months' trial must have con- 
vinced Burns of this. But besides rendering regular farm 
industry impossible, the weekly absences from home, which 
his new duties entailed, had other evil consequences. They 
brought with them continual mental distraction, which for- 
bade all sustained poetic effort, and laid him perilously 
open to indulgences which were sure to undermine regular 
habits and peace of mind. About this time (the begin- 
ning of 1790), we begin to hear of frequent visits to Dum- 
fries on Excise business, and of protracted lingerings at a 
certain howff, place of resort, called the Globe Tavern, 
which boded no good. There were also intromissions with 
a certain company of players then resident in Dumfries, and 
writings of such prologues for their second-rate pieces, as 
many a penny-a-liner could have done to order as well. 
Political ballads, too, came from his pen, siding with this 
or that party in local elections, all which things as we read, 
we feel as if we saw some noble high-bred racer harnessed 
to a dust-cart. 

His letters during the first half of 1790 betoken the 
same restless, unsatisfied spirit as those written towards 
the end of the previous year. Only we must be on our 
guard against interpreting his real state of mind too ex- 
clusively from his letters. For it seems to have been his 
habit when writing to his friends to take one mood of 
mind, which happened to be uppermost in him for the 
moment, and with which he knew that his correspondent 
sympathized, and to dwell on this so exclusively that for 
the moment it filled his whole mental horizon, and shut 
out every other thought. And not this only, which is the 
tendency of all ardent and impulsive natures, but we can- 
not altogether excuse Burns of at times half - consciously 
exaggerating these momentary moods, almost for certain 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 117 

stage effects which they produced. It is necessary, there- 
fore, in estimating his real condition at any time, to set 
against the account, which he gives of himself in his let- 
ters, the evidence of other facts, such as the testimony of 
those who met him from time to time, and who have left 
some record of those interviews. This I shall now do for 
the first half of the year 1790, and shall place, over against 
his self-revelations, some observations which show how he 
at this time appeared to others. 

An intelligent man named William Clark, who had served 
Burns as a ploughman at Ellisland during the winter half- 
year of 1789-90, survived till 1838, and in his old age 
gave this account of his former master : " Burns kept two 
men and two women servants, but he invariably when at 
home took his meals with his wife and family in the lii- 
tle parlour." Clark thought he was as good a manager of 
land as most of the farmers in the neighbourhood. The 
farm of Ellisland was moderately rented, and was suscepti- 
ble of much improvement, had improvement been then in 
repute. Burns sometimes visited the neighbouring farm- 
ers, and they returned the compliment; but that way of 
spending time was not so common then as now. No one 
thought that the poet and his writings would be so much 
noticed afterwards. He kept nine or ten milch cows, some 
young cattle, four horses, and several pet sheep : of the 
latter he was ver}^ fond. During the winter and spring- 
time, when not engaged in Excise business, " he sometimes 
held the plough for an hour or two for him (W. Clark), 
and was a fair workman. During seed-time. Burns might 
be frequently seen at an early hour in the fields with his 
sowing sheet ; but as he was often called away on business, 
he did not sow the whole of his grain." 

This old man went on to describe Burns as a kindly and 



118 ROBERT BURKS. [chap. 

indulgent master, who spoke familiarly to bis servants, 
both at home and a-field ; quick-tempered when anything 
put him out, but quickly pacified. Once only Clark saw 
him really angry, when one of the lasses had nearly choked 
one of the cows by giving her potatoes not cut small 
enough. Burns's looks, gestures, and voice were then ter- 
rible. Clark slunk out of the way, and when he returned, 
his master was quite calm again. When there was extra 
work to be done, he would give his servants a dram, but 
he was by no means over-fiush in this way. During the 
six months of his service, Clark never once saw Burns in- 
toxicated or incapable of managing his business. The 
poet, when at home, used to wear a broad blue bonnet, a 
long-tailed coat, drab or blue, corduroy breeches, dark blue 
stockings, with cootikens or gaiters. In cold weather he 
would have a plaid of black and white check wrapped 
round his shoulders. The same old man describes Mrs. 
Burns as a good and prudent housewife, keeping every- 
thing neat and tidy, well liked by her servants, for whom 
she provided good and abundant fare. When they parted, 
Burns paid Clark his wages in full, gave him a written 
character, and a shilling for s, fairing. 

In the summer or autumn of the same year the scholar- 
ly Ramsay of Ochtertyre in the course of a tour looked in 
on Burns, and here is the record of his visit which Ram- 
say gave in a letter to Currie. " Seeing him pass quickly 
near Closeburn, I said to my companion, 'That is Burns.' 
On coming to the inn, the hostler toJd us he would be 
back in a few hours to grant permits ; that where he met 
with anything seizable, he was no better than any other 
ganger ; in everything else that he was perfectly a gentle- 
man. After leaving a note to be delivered to him on his 
return, I proceeded to his house, being curious to see his 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 119 

Jean. I was mucli pleased with his ' uxor Sabina qualis,' 
and the poet's modest mansion, so unlike the habitation 
of ordinary rustics. In the evening he suddenly bounced 
in upon us, and said, as he entered, ' I come, to use the 
words of Shakespeare, steived in haste.'' In fact, he had 
ridden incredibly fast after receiving my note. We fell 
into conversation directly, and soon got into the mare 
magnum of poetry. He told me he had now gotten a 
subject for a drama, which he was to call Roh McQuech- 
an^s Elshin, from a popular story of Robert Bruce being 
defeated on the water of Cairn, when the heel of his boot 
having loosened in his flight, he applied to Robert Mac- 
Quechan to fit it, who, to make sure, ran his awl nine 
inches up the king's heel. We were now going on at a 
great rate, when Mr. Stewart popped m his head, which put 
a stop to our discourse, which had become very interesting. 
Yet in a little while it was resumed, and such was the force 
and versatility of the bard's genius, that he made the tears 
run down Mr. Stewart's cheeks, albeit unused to the poetic 
strain. From that time we met no more, and I was grieved 
at the reports of him afterwards. Poor Burns ! we shall 
hardly ever see his like again. He was, in truth, a sort of 
comet in literature, irregular in its motions, which did no 
good, proportioned to the blaze of light it displayed." 

It seems that during this autumn there came a momen- 
tary blink in Burns's clouded sky, a blink which, alas ! 
never brightened into full sunshine. He had been but a 
year m the Excise employment, when, through the renew- 
ed kindness of Mr. Graham of Fintray, there seemed a near 
prospect of his being promoted to a supervisorship, which 
would have given him an income of 200^. a year. So 
probable at the time did it seem, that his friend Nicol 
wrote to Ainslie expressing some fears that the poet might 



120 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

turn his back on his old friends when to the pride of ap- 
plauded genius was added the pride of office and income. 
This may have been ironical on Nicol's part, but he might 
have spared his irony on his friend, for the promotion 
never came. 

But what had Burns been doing for the last year in 
poetic production ? In this respect the whole interval be- 
tween the composition of the lines To Mary in Heaven, 
in October, 1789, and the autumn of the succeeding year, 
is almost a blank. Three electioneering ballads, besides a 
few trivial pieces, make up the whole. There is not a line 
written by him during this year which, if it were deleted 
from his works, would anyway impair his poetic fame. 
But this long barrenness was atoned for by a burst of 
inspiration which came on him in the fall of 1790, and 
struck off at one heat the matchless Tale of Tarn o' Shan- 
ter. It was to the meeting already noticed of Burns with 
Captain Grose, the antiquary, at Friars Carse, that we owe 
this wonderful poem. The poet and the antiquary suited 
each other exactly, and they soon became 

" Unco pack and thick thegither." 

Burns asked his friend, when he reached Ayrshire, to make 
a drawing of Alloway kirk, and include it in his sketches, 
for it was dear to him because it was the resting-place of 
his father, and there he himself might some day lay his 
bones. To induce Grose to do this, Burns told him that 
Alloway kirk was the scene of many witch stories and 
weird sights. The antiquary replied, " Write you a poem 
on the scene, and I'll put in the verses with an engraving 
of the ruin." Burns having found a fitting day and hour, 
when " his barmy noddle was working prime," walked out 
to his favourite path down the western bank of the river. 



v.] LIFE AT ELLlSLAiXD. 121 

The poem was the work of one day, of which Mrs. Burni? 
retained a vivid recollection. Her husband had spent most 
of the day by the river side, and in the afternoon she join- 
ed him with her two children. He was busily engaged 
crGoning to himsel ; ^nd Mrs. Burns, perceiving that her 
presence was an interruption, loitered behind with her lit- 
tle ones among the broom. Her attention was presently 
attracted by the strange and wild gesticulations of the 
bard, who was now seen at some distance, agonized with 
an ungovernable access of joy. He was reciting very loud, 
and with tears rolling down his cheeks, those animated 
verses which he had just conceived — 

" Now Tarn ! Tam ! had thae been queans, , 
A' plump and strappin' in their teens." 

" I wish ye had seen him," said his wife ; " he was in 
such ecstasy that the tears were happing down his cheeks." 
These last words are given by Allan Cunningham, in addi- 
tion to the above account, which Lockhart got from a man- 
uscript journal of Cromek. The poet having committed 
the verses to writing on the top of his sod-dyke above the 
water, came into the house, and read them immediately in 
high triumph at the fireside. 

Thus in the case of two of Burns's best poems, we have 
an account of the bard as he appeared in his hour of in- 
spiration, not to any literary friend bent on pictorial eilect, 
but from the plain narrative of his simple and admiring 
wife. Burns speaks of Tam o' Shunter as his first at- 
tempt at a tale in verse — unfortunately it was also his last. 
He himself regarded it as his master-piece of all his poems, 
and posterity has not, I believe, reversed the judgment. 

In this, one of his happiest flights, Burns's imagination 
bore him from the vale of Nith back to the ba?iks of 

6* 



122 ROBERT BURNS. [chap, 

Dooii, and to the weird tales he had there heard in child- 
hood, told by the winter firesides. The characters of the 
poem have been identified; that of Tarn is taken from a 
farmer, Douglas Graham, who lived at the farm of Shan- 
ter, in the parish of Kirkoswald. H« had a scolding wife, 
called Helen McTaggart, and the tombstones of both are 
pointed out in Kirkoswald kirkyard. Souter Johnnie is 
more uncertain, but is supposed, with some probability, to 
have been John Davidson, a shoemaker, who lies buried in 
the same place. Yet, from Burns's poem we would gather 
that this latter lived in Ayr. But these things matter lit- 
tle. From his experience of the smuggling farmers of 
Kirkoswald, among whom " he first became acquainted 
with scenes of swaggering and riot," and his remembrance 
of the tales that haunted the spot where he passed his 
childhood, combined with his knowledge of the peasantry, 
their habits and superstitions, Burns's imagination wove 
the inimitable tale. 

After this, the best poetic offspring of the Ellisland 
period, Burns composed only a few short pieces during 
his tenancy of that farm. Among these, however, was one 
which cannot be passed over. In January, 1791, the Earl 
of Glencairn, who had been his first, and it may be almost 
said, his only real friend and patron among the Scottish 
peerage, died at the early age of forty -two, just as he re- 
turned to Falmouth after a vain search for health abroad. 
Burns had always loved and honoured Lord Glencairn, as 
well he might — although his lordship's gentleness had not 
always missed giving offence to the poet's sensitive and 
proud spirit. Yet, on the whole, he was the best patron 
whom Burns had found, or was ever to find among his 
countrymen. When then he heard of the earl's death, he 
mourned iiis loss as that of a true friend, and poured forth 



V.J LIFE AT ELLISLAND. ]23 

a Hne lament, which conchidos with the following we')- 
kn^wn h'nes: 

" The bridegroom may forget the bride, 

Was made his wedded wife yestreen ; 
The monarch may forget the crown, 

That on his head an hour has been ; 
The mother may forget the child, 

That smiles sae sweetly on her knee ; 
But I'll remember thee, Glencairn, 

And a' that thou hast done for me." 

Burns's elegies, except when they are comical, are not 
among his happiest efforts. Some of them are frigid and 
affected. But this was the genuine language of sincere 
grief. He afterwards showed the permanence of his af- 
fection by calling one of his boys James Glencairn. 

A few songs make up the roll of the Eliisland produc- 
tions durmg 1791. One only of these is noteworthy — 
^hat most popiiJar song. The Banks o' Boon. His own 
>'ords in sending it to a friend are these : — " March, 1791. 
♦Vhile here I sit, sad and solitary, by the side of a fire, in 
a little country inn, and drying my wet clothes, in pops a 
poor fellow of a sodger, and tells me he is going to Ayr. 
By heavens ! say I to myself, with a tide of good spirits, 
which the magic of that sound, ' Auld Toon o' Ayr,' con- 
jured up, I will send my last song to Mr. Ballantine." 

Then he gives the second and best version of the song, 
beginning thus : 

*' Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon, 
How can ye blume sae fair ? 
How can ye chant, ye little birds, 
And I sae fu' o' care !" 

The latest edition of Burns's works, by Mr. Scott Doug- 
las, gives three different versions of this song. Any one 



124 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

wlio will compare these, will see the truth of that remart 
of tne poet, in one of nis letters to Dr. Moore, " I have 
no doubt that the knack, the aptitude to learn the Muses 
trade is a gift bestowed by Him who forms the secret bias 
of the soul ; but I as firmly believe that excellence in the 
profession is the fruit of industr}^, attention, labour, and 
pains; at least I am resolved to try my doctrine by the 
test of experience." 

The second version was that which Burns wrought out 
by careful revision, from an earlier one. Compare, for in- 
stance, with the verse given above, the first verse as oriffJ- 
nally struck off : 

" Sweet are the banks, the banks of Doon, 
The spreading flowers are fair, 
And everything is blythe and glad. 
But I am fu' of care." 

And the other changes he made on the first draugbt are 
all in the way of improvement. It is painful to know, 
on the authority of Allan Cunningham, that he who com- 
posed this pure and perfect song, and many another sucn, 
sometimes chose to work in baser metal, and that song- 
ware of a lower kind escaped from his hands into the 
press, and could never afterwards be recalled. 

When Burns told Dr. Moore that he was resolved to try 
by the test of experience the doctrine that good and per- 
manent poetry could not be composed without industry 
and pains, he had in view other and wider plans of com- 
position than any which he ever realized. He told Ram- 
say of Ochtertyre, as we have seen, that he had in view to 
render into poetry a tradition he had found of an advent- 
ure in humble life which Bruce met with during bis war- 
derinirs. AVhether he ever did more than think over the 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 125 

story of Rob McQiiechan's Elshin, or into what poetic form 
he intended to cast it, we know not. As Sir Walter said, 
any poem he might have produced on this subject would 
certainly have wanted that tinge of chivalrous feeling which 
the manners of the age and the character of the king alike 
demanded. But with Burns's ardent admiration of Bruce, 
and that power of combining the most homely and humor- 
ous incidents with the pathetic and the sublime, which he 
displayed in Tam o' Shanter, we cannot but regret that he 
never had the leisure and freedom from care which would 
have allowed him to try his hand on a subject so entirely 
to his mind. 

^ Besides this, he had evidently, during his sojourn at Ellis- 
land, meditated some large dramatic attempt. He wrote to 
one of his correspondents that he had set himself to study 
Shakespeare, and intended to master all the greatest drama- 
tists, both of England and France, with a view to a dramatic 
effort of his own. If he had attempted it in pure English, 
we may venture to predict that he would have failed. But 
had he allowed himself that free use of the Scottish dialect 
of which he was the supreme master, especially if he had 
shaped the subject into a lyrical drama, no one can say 
what he might not have achieved. Many of his smaller 
poems show that he possessed the genuine dramatic vein. 
The Jolly Beggars, unpleasant as from its grossness it is. 
shows the presence of this vein in a very high degree, see- 
ing that from materials so unpromising he could make so 
much. As Mr. Lockhart has said, "That extraordinary 
sketch, coupled with his later lyrics in a higher vein, is 
enough to show that in him we had a master capable of 
placing the musical drama on a level with the loftiest of 
our classical forms." 

Regrets have been expressed that Burns, instead of ad- 



126 KOBERT BURNS. [chap. 

dressing himself to these high poetic enterprises, which had 
certainly hovered before him, frittered away so much of 
his time in composing for musical collections a large num- 
ber of songs, the very abundance of which must have les- 
sened their quality. And yet it may be doubted whether 
this urgent demand for songs, made on him by Johnson 
and Thomson, was not the only literary call to which he 
would in his circumstances have responded. These calls 
could be met, by sudden efforts, at leisure moments, when 
some, occasional blink of momentary inspiration came over 
him. JGreat poems necessarily presuppose that the orig- 
inal inspiration is sustained by concentrated purpose and 
long-sustained effort ; mental habits, which to a nature like 
Burns's must have at all times been difficult, and which his 
circumstances during his later years rendered simpl}^ im- 
possible. From the first he had seen that his farm would 
not pay, and each succeeding year confirmed him in this 
conviction. To escape what he calls "the crushing grip 
of poverty, which, alas ! I fear, is less or more fatal to the 
worth and purity of the noblest souls," he had, within a 
year after entering Ellisland, recourse to Excise work. This 
he did from a stern sense of duty to his wife and family. 
It was, in fact, one of the most marked instances in which 
Burns, contrary to his too frequent habit, put pride in his 
pocket, and sacrificed inclination to duty. But that he 
had not accepted the yoke without some painful sense of 
degradation, is shown by the bitterness of many of his re- 
marks, when in his correspondence he alludes to the sub- 
ject. There were, however, times when he tried to take a 
brighter view of it, and to persuade himself, as he says in 
a letter to Lady Harriet Don, that " one advantage he had 
in this new business was the knowledge it gave him of the 
various shades of character in man — consequently assisting 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 127 

him in his trade as a poet." But, alas ! whatever advan- 
tages in this way it might have brought, were counteracted 
tenfold by other circumstances that attended it. The con- 
tinual calls of a responsible business, itself sufficient to oc- 
cupy a man — when divided with the oversight of his farm, 
overtasked his powers, and left him no leisure for poetic 
work, except from time to time crooning over a random 
song. Then the habits which his roving Excise life must 
have induced were, even to a soul less social than that of 
Burns, perilous in the extreme. The temptations he was 
in this way exposed to, Lockhart has drawn with a power- 
ful hand. " From the castle to the cottage, every door 
flew open at his approach ; and the old system of hospital- 
ity, then flourishing, rendered it difficult for the most so- 
berly inclined guest to rise from any man's board in the 
same trim that he sat down to it. The farmer, if Burns 
was seen passing, left his reapers, and trotted by the side 
of Jenny Geddes, until he could persuade the bard that the 
day was hot enough to demand an extra libation. If he 
entered an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in 
bed, the news of his arrival circulated from the cellar to 
the garret ; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, the landlord 
and all his guests were assembled round the ingle ; the 
largest punch-bowl was produced, and — - 

'Be ours to-uight-— who knows what comes to-morrow?' 

was the language of every eye in the circle that welcomed 
him. The highest gentry of the neighbourhood, when bent 
on special merriment, did not think the occasion complete 
unless the wit and eloquence of Burns were called in to 
enliven their carousals." 

It can readily be imagined how distracting such a life 
must have been, how fatal to all mental concentration on 



i28 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

high objects, not to speak of the habits of which it was 
too sure to sow the seeds. The frequent visits to Dum- 
fries which his Excise work entailed, and the haunting of 
the Globe Tavern, already spoken of, led to consequences 
which, more than even deep potations, must have been 
fatal to his peace. 

His stay at Ellisland is now hastening to a close. Be- 
fore passing, how^ever, from that, on the whole the best 
period of his life since manhood, one or two incidents of 
the spring of 1791 must be mentioned. In the February 
of that year Burns received from the Rev. Archibald 
Alison, Episcopalian clergyman in Edinburgh, a copy of 
his once famous, but now, I believe, forgotten. Essay on 
Taste^ which contained the authorized exposition of that 
theory, so congenial to Scotch metaphysics, that objects 
seem beautiful to us only because our minds associate 
them with sensible objects which have previously given us 
pleasure. In his letter to the author, acknowledging the 
receipt of his book. Burns says, " I own, sir, at first glance, 
several of your propositions startle me as paradoxical : 
that the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in 
it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime than the twingle- 
twangle of a Jew's-harp ; that the delicate flexure of a 
rose-twig, when the half-blown flow^er is heavy with the 
tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant 
than the upright stub of a burdock ; and that from some- 
thing innate and independent of all association of ideas — 
these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths until 
perusing your book shook my faith." These words so 
pierce this soap-bubble of the metaphysicians, that we can 
hardly read them without fancying that the poet meant 
them to be ironical. Dugald Stewart expressed surprise 
that the unschooled Ayrshire ploughman should ha\c 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 129 

found "a distinct conception of the general principles of 
the doctrine of association ;" on which Mr. Carlyle re- 
marks, " We rather think that far subtler things than the 
doctrine of association had been of old familiar to him." 

In looking over his letters at this time (1791), we are 
startled by a fierce outburst in one of them, apparently 
apropos of nothing. He had been recommending to the 
protection of an Edinburgh friend a schoolmaster, whom 
he thought unjustly persecuted, when all at once he breaks 
out : " God help the children of Dependence ! Hated and 
persecuted by their enemies, and too often, alas ! almost 
unexceptionally, received by their friends with disrespect 
and reproach, under the thin disguise of cold civility and 
humiliating advice. Oh to be a sturdy savage, stalking in 
the pride of his independence, amid the solitary wilds of 
his deserts, rather than in civilized life helplessly to trem- 
ble for a subsistence, precarious as the caprice of a fellow- 
creature ! Every man has his virtues, and no man is with- 
out his failings ; and curse on that privileged plain-speak- 
ing of friendship which, in the hour of my calamity, can- 
not reach forth the helping-hand without at the same time 
pointing out those failings, and apportioning them their 
share in procuring my present distress. ... I do not want 
to be independent that I may sin, but I want to be inde- 
pendent in my sinning." 

What may have been the cause of this ferocious ex- 
plosion there is no explanation. Whether the real source 
of it may not have lain in certain facts which had occurred 
during the past spring, that must have rudely broken in 
on the peace at once of his conscience and his home, we 
cannot say. Certainly it does seem, as Chambers suggests, 
like one of those sudden outbursts of temper which fasten 
on some mere passing accident, because the real seat of it 



1:S0 ROBERT BURNS. [chai-, 

lies tuo deep for words. Some instances of the same tem- 
per we have ah-eady seen. This is a sample of a growing 
exasperation of spirit, which found expression from time 
to time till the close of his life. 

Let us turn from this painful subject, to one of the only 
notices we get of him from a stranger's hand during the 
summer of 1791. Two English gentlemen, who were 
travelling, went to visit him ; one of whom has left an 
amusing account of their reception. Calling at his house, 
they were told that the poet was by the river side, and 
thither they went in search of him. On a rock that pro- 
jected into the stream, they saw a man employed in an- 
gling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap of fox's 
skin on his head, a loose great-coat fixed round him by a 
belt, from which depended an enormous Highland broad- 
sword. It was Burns. He received them with great cor- 
diality, and asked them to share his humble dinner — an 
invitation which they accepted. " On the table they found 
boiled beef, with vegetables and barley broth, after the 
manner of Scotland. After dinner the bard told them 
ingenuously that he had no wine, nothing better than 
Highland whiskey, a bottle of which he set on the board. 
He produced at the same time his punch-bowl, made of 
Inverary marble ; and, mixing it with water and sugar, 
filled their glasses and invited them to drink. The travel- 
lers w^ere in haste, and, besides, the flavour of the whiskey 
to their southern palates was scarcely tolerable ; but the 
generous poet offered them his best, and his ardent hospi- 
tality they found impossible to resist. Burns was in his 
happiest mood, and the charm of his conversation was al- 
together fascinating. He ranged over a variety of topics, 
illuminating whatever he touched. He related the tales 
of his infancy and youth ; he recited some of his gayest 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAXD. 131 

and some of his tenderest poems ; in the wildest of his 
strains of mirth he threw in some touches of melancholy, 
and spread around him the electric emotions of his power- 
ful mind. The Highland whiskey improved in its flavour; 
the marble bowl was again and again emptied and replen- 
ished ; the guests of our poet forgot the flight of time and 
the dictates of prudence ; at the hour of midnight they 
lost their way to Dumfries, and could scarcely distinguish 
it when assisted by the morning's dawn. There is much 
naivete in the way the English visitor narrates his experi- 
ence of that ' nicht wi' Burns.' " 

Mr. Carlyle, if we remember aright, has smiled incred- 
ulously at the story of the fox-skin cap, the belt, and the 
broadsword. But of the latter appendage this is not the 
only record. Burns himself mentions it as a frequent ac- 
companim.ent of his when he went out by the river. 

The punch-bowl here mentioned is the one which his 
father-in-law had wrought for him as a marriage-gift. It 
was, when Chambers wrote his biography of Burns, in the 
possession of Mr. Haistie, then M.P. for Paisley, who is 
said to have refused for it three hundred guineas — "a 
sum," says Chambers, " that would have set Burns on his 
legs for ever." 

This is the last glimpse we get of the poet in his home 
at Ellisland till the end came. We have seen that he had 
long determined, if possible, to get rid of his farm. He 
had sunk in it all the proceeds that remained to him from 
the sale of the second edition of his poems, and for this 
the crops he had hitherto reaped had given no adequate 
return. Three years, however, were a short trial, and 
there was a good time coming for all farmers, when the 
war with France broke out, and raised the value of farm 
produce to a hitherto unknown amount. Tf Burns could 



182 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

but have waited for that ! — but either he could not, or he 
would not wait. But the truth is, even if Burns ever had 
it in him to succeed as a farmer, that time was past when 
he came to Ellisland. Independence at the plough-tail, of 
which he often boasted, was no longer possible for him. 
He could no more work as he had done of yore. The 
habits contracted in Edinburgh had penetrated too deeply. 
Even if he had not been withdrawn from his farm by Ex- 
cise duties, he could neither work continuously himself, 
nor make his servants work. " Faith," said a neighbour- 
ing farmer, "how could he miss but fail? He brought 
with him a bevy of servants from Ayrshire. The lasses 
did nothing but bake bread (that is, oat-cakes), and the 
lads sat by the fireside and ate it warm with ale." Burns 
meanwhile enjoying himself at the house of some jovial 
farmer or convivial laird. How could he miss but fail ? 

When he had resolved on giving up his farm, an ar- 
rangement was come to with the Laird of Dalswinton by 
which Burns was allowed to throw up his lease and sell 
off his crops. Thesal^took place in the last week in 
August (1791). d^^H^his da^jte auctioneer and the 
bottle always appe^^Wfe Sy si^e^Pi©hambers observes ; 
but then far more than now-a-days. After the roup, that 
is the sale, of his crop was over, Burns, in one of his let- 
ters, describes the scene that took place within and with- 
out his house. It was one which exceeded anything he 
had ever seen in drunken horrors. Mrs. Burns and her 
family fortunately were not there to witness it, having 
gone many weeks before to Ayrshire, probably to be out 
of the way of all the pain that accompanies the breaking 
up of a country home. When Burns gave up his lease, 
Mr. Millar, the landlord, sold Ellisland to a stranger, be- 
cause the farm was an outlying one, inconveniently situ- 



v.] LIFE AT ELLISLA.\D. loo 

ated, ou a different side of the river from tlie rest of his 
estate. It was in November or December that Burns sold 
off his farm -stock and implements of husbandry, and 
moved his family and furniture into the town of Dura- 
fries, leaving at Ellisland no memorial of himself, as Allan 
Cunningham tells us, " but a putting-stone with which he 
loved to exercise his strength, and 300/. of his money, 
sunk beyond redemption in a speculation from which all 
had augured happiness." 

It is not without deep regret that even now we think 
of Burns's departure' from this beautiful spot. If there 
was any position on earth in which he could have been 
happy and fulfilled his genius, it would have been on such 
a farm — always providing that it could have given him 
the means of a comfortable livelihood, and that he himself 
could have guided his ways aright. That he might have 
had a fair opportunity, how often one has wished that he 
could have met some landlord who could have acted to- 
wards him, as the present Duke of Buccleuch did towards 
the Ettrick Shepherd in his later days, and have given a 
farm on which he could have sat rent-free. Such an act, 
one is apt to fancy, would have been honourable alike to 
giver and receiver. Indeed, a truly noble nature would 
have been only too grateful to find such an opportunity 
put in his way of employing a small part of his wealth for 
so good an end. But the notions of modern society, 
founded as they are so entirely on individual indepen- 
dence, for the most part preclude the doing and the re- 
ceiving of such favours. And with this social feeling no 
man was ever more filled than Burns. 



CHAPTER VI. 



MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 



A GREAT change it must have been to pass from the pleas- 
ant hohiis and broomy banks of the Nith at Ellisland to 
a town home in the Wee Vennel of Dumfries. It was, 
moreover, a confession visible to the world of what Burns 
himself had long felt, that his endeavour to combine the 
actual and the ideal, his natural calling as a farmer with 
the exercise of his gift as a poet, had failed, and that 
henceforth he must submit to a round of toil, which, nei- 
ther in itself nor in its surroundings, had anything to re- 
deem it from commonplace diudgery. He must have felt, 
from the time when he first became Exciseman, that he 
had parted company with all thought of steadily working 
out his ideal, and that whatever he might now do in that 
way must be by random snatches. To his proud spirit 
the name of ganger must have been gall and wormwood, 
and it is much to his credit that for the sake of his w'lie 
and children he was content to undergo what he often felt 
to be a social obloquy. It would have been well for him 
if this had been the only drawback to his new calling. 
Unfortunately the life into which it led him exposed him 
to those very temptations which his nature was least able 
to withstand. If social indulgence and irregular habits 
had somewhat impaired his better resolves, and his power 
of poetic concentration, before he left Ellisland, Dumfries, 



CHAP. VI. J >n(;RATI(>X TO DUMFRIES. i;{r. 

and the society into which it threw him, did with increased 
rapidity tlie fatal work which had been ah*eady begun. 
His biographers, though with varying degrees of emphasis, 
on the whole, agree that, from the time he settled in Dum- 
fries, "his moral course was downwards." 

The social condition of Dumfries at the time when 
Burns went to live in it was neither better nor worse than 
that of other provincial towns in Scotland. What that 
was, Dr. Chambers has depicted from his own youthful 
experience of just such another country town. The curse 
of such towns, he tells us, was that large numbers of their 
inhabitants were either half or wholly idle; either men 
living on competences, with nothing to do, or shopkeepers 
with their time but half employed ; their only amusement 
to meet in taverns, soak, gossip, and make stupid personal 
jokes. " The weary waste of spirits and energy at those 
soaking evening meetings was deplorable. Insipid toasts, 
petty raillery, euipty gabble about trivial occurrences, end- 
less disputes on small questions of fact, these relieved now 
and then by a song" — such Chambers describes as the 
items which made up provincial town life in his younger 
days. "A life," he says, "it was without progress or 
profit, or anything that tended to moral elevation." For 
such dull companies to get a spirit like Burns among 
them, to enliven them with his wit and eloquence, what a 
windfall it must have been ! But for him to put his time 
and his powers at their disposal, how great the degradation I 
During the day, no doubt, he was employed busily enough 
in doing his duty as an Excisemaft, This could now be 
done with less travelling than in the Ellisland days, and 
did not require him, as formerly, to keep a horse. When 
the day's work was over, his small house in the Wee 
VenneJ, and the domestic hearth with the family ties gath- 



186 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

ercd round it, were not enougli for him. At Ellisland he 
had sung — 

" To make a happy fire-side clime, 
For weans and wife, 
Is the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life. ' 

But it is one thing to sing wisely, another to practise 
wisdom. Too frequently at nights Burns's love of sociali- 
ty and excitement drove him forth to seek the compan- 
ionship of neighbours and drouthy cronies, who gathered 
habitually at the Globe Tavern and other such haunts. 
From these he was always sure to meet a warm welcome, 
abundant appreciation, and even flattery, for to this he 
was not inaccessible ; while their humble station did not 
jar in any way on his social prejudices, nor their mediocre 
talents interfere with his love of pre-eminence. In such 
companies Burns no doubt had the gratification of feeling 
that he was, what is proverbially called, cock of the walk. 
The desire to be so probably grew with that growing dis- 
like to the rich and the titled, which was observed in him 
after he came to Dumfries. In earlier days we have seen 
that he did not shrink from the society of the greatest 
magnates,, and when they showed him that deference 
which he thought his due, he even enjoyed it. But now 
so bitter had grown his scorn and dislike of the upper 
classes, that we are told that if any one named a lord, or 
alluded to a man of rank in his presence, he instantly 
"crushed the offender in an epigram, or insulted him by 
some sarcastic sally." In a letter written during his first 
year at Dumfries, this is the way he speaks of his daily 
occupations : — " Hurry of business, grinding the faces of 
the publican and the sinner on the merciless wheels of 
the Excise,, makinsr ballads, and then drinkino- and sino^inoj 



VI. J MIGRATIOxN TO DUMFRIES. 137 

them ; and over and above all, correcting the press of two 
different publications." But besides these duties by day 
and the convivialities by night, there were other calls on 
his time and strength, to which Burns was by his repu- 
tation exposed. When those of the country gentry whom 
he still knew were in Dumfries for some hours, or when 
any party of strangers passing through the town had an 
idle evening on their hands, it seems to have been their 
custom to summon Burns to assist them in spending it; 
and he was weak enough, on receiving the message, to 
leave his home and adjourn to the Globe, the George, or 
the King's Arms, there to drink with them late into the 
night, and waste his powers for their amusement. Verily, 
a Samson, as has been said, making sport for Philistines ! 
To one such invitation his impromptu answer was — 

" The king's most humble servant, I 
Can scarcely spare a minute ; 
But I'll be with you by-and-by, 
Or else the devil's in it." 

And this w^e may be sure was the spirit of many an- 
other reply to these ill-omened invitations. It would have 
been well if, on these occasions, the pride he boasted of 
had stood him in better stead, and repelled such unjustifi- 
able intrusions. But in this, as in so many other respects, 
Burns was the most inconsistent of men. 

From the time of his migration to Dumfries, it would 
appear that he was gradually dropped out of an acquaint- 
ance by most of the Dumfriesshire lairds, as he had long 
been by the parochial and all other ministers. I have 
only conversed with one person who remembered in his 
boyhood to have seen Burns. He was the son of a Dum- 
friesshire baronet, the representative of the House of Red- 

7 



138 ROBERT BURXS. [chap. 

gauntlet. The poet was frequently in the neighbourhood 
of the baronet's country seat, but the old gentleman so 
highly disapproved of "Robbie Burns," that he forbade 
liis sons to have anything to do with him. My inform- 
ant, therefore, though he had often seen, had never spoken 
to the poet. When I conversed with him, his age was 
nigh four -score years, and the one thing he remem- 
bered about Burns was " the blink of his black eye." 
This is probably but a sample of the feeling with which 
Burns was regarded by most of the country gentry around 
Dumfries. What were the various ingredients that made 
up their dislike of him it is not easy now exactly to de- 
termine. Politics most likely had a good deal .to do with 
it, for they were Tories and aristocrats, Burns was a Whig 
and something more. Though politics may have formed 
the chief, they were not probably the only element in their 
9i^ersion. Yet though the majority of the county fami- 
lies turned their backs on him, there were some with which 
be still continued intimate. 

These were either the few Whig magnates of the south- 
ern counties, whose political projects he supported by elec- 
tioneering ballads, charged with all the powers of sarcasm 
he could Avield; or those still fewer, whose literary tastes 
were strong enough to make them willing, for the sake of 
his genius, to tolerate both his radical politics and his ir- 
regular life. Among these latter was a younger, brother 
of Burns's old friend. Glen Riddel, Mr. Walter Riddel, who 
with his wife had settled at a place four miles from Dum- 
fries, formerly called Goldie-lea, but named after Mrs. Rid- 
(^'el's maiden name, Woodley Park. Mrs. Riddel was hand- 
some, clever, witty, not without some tincture of letters, 
pnd some turn for verse -making. She and her husband 
v>'elcomed the poet to Woodh^y Park, where for two years 



VI.] MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 139 

he was a constant and favourite guest. The lady's wit 
and literary taste found, it may be believed, no other so 
responsive spirit in all the south of Scotland. In the third 
year came a breach in their friendship, followed by a sav- 
age lampoon of Burns on the lady, because she did not at 
once accept his apology ; then a period of estrangement. 
After an interval, however, the Riddels forgave the insult, 
and were reconciled to the poet, and when the end came, 
Mrs. Riddel did her best to befriend him, and to do hon- 
our to his memory when he was gone. 

It ought perhaps to have been mentioned before, that 
about the time of Burns's first settling at Dumfries, that is 
towards the close of 1V91, he paid his last visit to Edin- 
burgh. It was occasioned by the news that Clarinda was 
about to sail for the West Indies, in search of the husband 
who had forsaken her. Since Burns's marriage the silence 
between them seems to have been broken by only two let- 
ters to Clarinda from Ellisland. In the first of these he 
resents the name of " villain," with which she appears to 
have saluted him. In the second he admits that his past 
conduct had been wrong, but concludes by repeating his 
error and enclosing a song addressed to her in the most 
exaggerated strain of love. Now he rushed to Edinburgh 
to see her once more before she sailed. The interview 
was a brief and hurried one, and no record of it remains, 
except some letters ?ind a few impassioned lyrics which 
about that time he ?iddressed to her. The first letter is 
stiff and formal, as if to break the ice of lono; estrano-e- 
ment. The others are in the last strain of rapturous de- 
votion — language which, if feigned, is the height of folly ; 
if real, is worse. The lyrics are some of them strained 
and artificial. One, however, stands out from all the rest, 
as one of the most impassioned effusions that Burns ever 



140 ROBERT lURNS. [chap. 

poured forth. It contains that one consummate stanza 
in which Scott, Byron, and many more, saw concentrated 
" the essence of a thousand love-tales " — 

" Had we never loved so kindly, 
Had we never loved so blindly ; 
Never met, or never parted, 
We had ne'er been broken-hearted." 

After a time Mrs. M'Lehose returned from the West 
Indies, but without having recovered her truant husband. 
On her return, one or two more letters Burns wrote to her 
in the old exaggerated strain — the last in June, 1794 — af- 
ter which Clarinda disappears from the scene. 

Other Delilahs on a smaller scale Burns met with dur- 
ing his Dumfries sojourn, and to these he was ever and 
anon addressing songs of fancied love. By the attentions 
which the wayward husband was continually paying to 
ladies and others into whose society his wife could not 
accompany him, the patience of " bonny Jean," it may 
easily be conceived, must have been severely tried. 

It would have been well, however, if stray flirtations 
and Platonic affections had been all that could be laid to 
his charge. But there is a darker story. The facts of it 
are told by Chambers in connexion with the earlier part 
of the Dumfries period, and need not be repeated here. 
Mrs. Burns is said to have been a marvel of long-suffering 
and f orgivingness ; but the way she bore those wrongs 
must have touched her husband's better nature, and pierced 
him to the quick. When his calmer moments came, that 
very mildness must have made him feel, as nothing else 
could, what self-reproach was, and what 

" Self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood." 
To the pangs of that remorse have, I doubt not, been tru- 



vi.J MIGRATION TO DUMFKIE:;^. 141 

ly attributed those bitter outpourings of disgust with the 
world and with society which are to be found in some of 
his letters, especially in those of his later years. Some 
samples of these outbreaks have been given ; more might 
easily have been added. The injuries he may have re- 
ceived from the world and society, what were they com- 
pared with those which he could not help feeling that he 
had inflicted on himself? It is when a man's own con- 
science is against him that the world looks worst. 

During the first year at Dumfries, Burns for the first 
time began to dabble in politics, which ere long landed 
him in serious trouble. Before this, though he had pass- 
ed for a sort of Jacobite, he had been in reality a Whig. 
While he lived in Edinburgh he had consorted more with 
Whigs than with Tories, but yet he had not in any marked 
way committed himself as a partisan. The only exception 
to this were some expressions in his poetry favourable to 
the Stuarts, and his avowed dislike to the Brunswick dy- 
nasty. Yet, notwithstanding these, his Jacobitism was but 
skin deep. It was only with him, as with so many anoth- 
er Scot of that day, the expression of his discontent with 
the Union of 1707, and his sense of the national degra- 
dation that had followed it. When in song he sighed to 
see Jamie come hame, this was only a sentimental protest 
against the existing order of things. But by the time he 
came to Dumfries the day of Jacobitism was over, and 
the whole aspect of the political heavens seemed dark with 
coming change. The French Revolution was in full swing, 
and vibrations of it were felt in the remotest corners of 
Europe. These reached even to the dull provincial towns 
of Scotland, and roused the pot-house politicians with 
whom Burns consorted, at the Globe and other taverns, to 
unwonted excitement. Under this nciw stimulus, Burns's 



' 142 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

previous Jacobitisra passed towards the opposite, but not 
very distant, extreme of Jacobinism. At these gatherings 
we may easily imagine that, with his native eloquence, his 
debating power, trained in the Tarbolton Club, and his 
ambition to shine as a public speaker, the voice of Burns 
would be the loudest and most vehement. Liberty, Equal- 
ity, Fraternity, these were words which must have found 
an echo in his inmost heart. But it was not only the 
abstract rights of. man, but the concrete wrongs of Scot- 
land that would be there discussed. And wrongs no 
doubt there were, under which Scotland was suffering, 
ever since the Union had destroyed not only her national- 
ity, but almost her political existence. The franchise had 
become very close — in the counties restricted to a few of 
the chief families — in the boroughs thrown into the hands 
of the Baillies, who w^ere venal beyond conception. It 
was the day, too, of Henry Dundas. A prominent mem- 
ber of the Pitt administration, he ruled Scotland as an 
autocrat, and as the dispenser of all her patronage. A 
patriotic autocrat no doubt, loving his country, and pro- 
viding well for those of her people whom he favoured — 
still an autocrat. The despotism of Dundas has been 
pictured, in colours we may well believe sufficiently strong, 
by Lord Cockburn and others bent on inditing the Epic 
of Whiggery, in which they and their friends should fig- 
ure as heroes and martyrs. But whatever may be said 
against Dundas's regime as a permanent system, it must 
be allowed that this was no time to remodel it when Eng- 
land was face to face with the French troubles. When 
the tempest is breaking over the ship, the captain may 
reasonably be excused for thinking that the moment would 
be ill chosen for renewing cordage or repairing timbers. 
Whatever may have been right in a time of quiet, it was 



VI.] MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 143 

not unuatiii'al that the Pitt administration sliould postpone 
all thoughts of reform, till the vessel of the State had 
weathered the storm which was then upon her. 

Besides his conviction as to public wrongs to be re- 
dressed, Burns had, he thought, personal grievances to 
complain of, which, as is so often seen, added fuel to his 
reforming zeal. His great powers, which he believed en- 
titled him to a very different position, were unacknowl- 
edged and disregarded by the then dispensers of patron- 
age. Once he had been an admirer of Pitt, latterly he 
could not bear the mention of his name. Of the ministry, 
Addington, we have seen, was fully alive to his merits, and 
pressed his claims on Pitt, who himself was quite awake 
to the charm of Burns's poetry. The Premier, it is said, 
" pushed the bottle on to Dundas, and did nothing " — to 
Dundas, too practical and too prosaic to waste a thought 
on poets and poetry. Latterly this neglect of him by 
public men preyed on the spirit of Burns, and was seldom 
absent from his thoughts. It added force, no doubt, to 
the rapture with which he, like all the younger poets of 
the time, hailed the French Revolution, and the fancied 
dawn of that day, which would place plebeian genius and 
worth in those high places, whence titled emptiness and 
landed incapacity would be at length thrust ignominiously 
down. , 

Burns had not been more than three months in Dum- 
fries, before he found an opportunity of testifying by deed 
his sympathy with the French Revolutionists. At that 
time the whole coast of the Solway swarmed with smug- 
gling vessels, carrying on a contraband traffic, and manned 
by men of reckless character, like the Dirk Hatteraick of 
Guy Mannering. In 1792, a suspicious-looking brig ap- 
peared in the Solway, and Burns, with other excisemen, 



144 ROBERT BURXS. [chap. 

was set to watch licr motions. She got into shallow 
water, when the gangers, enforced by some dragoons, 
waded out to her, and Burns, sword in hand, was the first 
to board her. The captured brig " Rosamond," with all 
her arms and stores, was sold next day at Dumfries, and 
Burns became the purchaser of four of her guns. These 
he sent, with a letter, to the French Legislative Assem- 
bly, requesting them to accept the present as a mark of 
Ms admiration and sympathy. The guns with the letter 
never reached their destination. They were, however, 
intercepted by the Custom-house officers at Dover, and 
Burns at once became a suspected man in the eye of the 
Government. Lockhart, who tells this incident, connects 
with it the song, The DeiVs awa' wi' the Exciseman, which 
Burns, he said, composed while waiting on the shore to 
watch the brig. But Mr. Scott Douglas doubts whether 
the song is referable to this occasion. However this may 
be, the folly of Burns's act can hardly be disputed. He 
was in the employ of Government, and had no right to 
express in this way his sympathy with a movement 
which, he must have known, the Government, under whom 
he served, regarded, if not yet with open hostility, at least 
with jealous suspicion. Men who think it part of their 
personal right and public duty unreservedly to express, by 
word and deed, their views on politics, had better not seek 
employment in the public service. Burns having once 
drawn upon himself the suspicions of his superiors, all his 
words and actions were no doubt closely watched. It was 
found that he "gat the Gazetteer," a revolutionary print 
published in Edinburgh, which only the most extreme 
men patronized, and which after a few months' existence 
was suppressed by Government. As the year 1792 drew 
to a close, the political heaven, both at home and abroad, 



VI.] MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 145 

became ominously dark. In Paris the king was in prison, 
the Reign of Terror had begun, and innocent blood of 
loyalists flowed freely in the streets ; the republic which 
had been established was threatening to propagate its 
principles in other countries by force of arras. In this 
country, what at the beginning of the year had been but 
suspicion of France, was now turned to avowed hostility, 
and war against the republic was on the eve of being 
declared. There were uneasy symptoms, too, at home. 
Tom Paine's Rights of Man and Age of Reason were 
spreading questionable doctrines and fomenting disaffec- 
tion. Societies named Friends of the People were formed 
in Edinburgh and the chief towns of Scotland, to demand 
reform of the representation and other changes, which, 
made at such a time, were believed by those in power to 
cover seditious aims. At such a crisis any government 
might be expected to see that all its officers, from the 
highest to the lowest, were well affected. But though 
the Reign of Terror had alarmed many others who had 
at first looked favourably on the Revolution in France, 
Burns's ardour in its cause was no whit abated. He even 
denounced the war on which the ministry had determined ; 
he openly reviled the men in power; and went so far in 
his avowal of democracy that at a social meeting, he pro- 
posed as a toast, " Here's the last verse of the last chapter 
of the last Book of Kings.'" This would seem to be but 
one specimen of the freedom of political speech in which 
Burns at this time habitually indulged — the truculent way 
in which he flaunted defiance in the face of authority. It 
would not have been surprising if at any time the Govern- 
ment had ordered inquiry to be made into such conduct, 
much less in such a season of anxiety and distrust. That 
an inquiry was made is undoubted ; but as to the result 

1* 



146 ROBERT BURXS. [chak 

which followed it, there is uncertainty. Some have 
thought that the poet received' from his superiors only 
a slight hint or caution to be more careful in future. 
Others believed, that the matter went so far that he was 
in serious danger of dismissal from his post; and that 
this was only averted by the timely interposition of some 
kind and powerful friends. That Burns himself took a 
serious view of it, and was sufficiently excited and alarmed, 
may be seen from two letters which he wrote, the one at 
the time of the occurrence, the other soon after it. It 
■was thus that in December, 1792, he addressed Mr. Graham 
of Fintray, the same person whose good offices had at first 
obtained for the poet his appointment, and whose kind- 
ness never failed him while he lived : 

"Sir, — I have been surprised, confounded, and dis- 
tracted by Mr. Mitchell, the collector, telling me that he 
has received an order from your Board to inquire into my 
political conduct, and blaming me as a person disaffected 
to Government. 

" Sir, you are a husband and a father. You know what 
you would feel to see the much-loved wife of your bosom, 
and your helpless, prattling little ones turned adrift into 
the world, degraded and disgraced from a situation in 
which they had been respectable and respected, and left 
almost without the necessary support of a miserable ex- 
istence. 

"Alas ! sir, must I think that such soon will be my lot! 
and from the dark insinuations of hellish, groundless 
envy, too ! I believe, sir, I may aver it, and in the sight 
of Omniscience, that I would not tell a deliberate false- 
hood, no, not though even worse horrors, if w orse can be, 
than those I have mentioned, hung over my head ; and I 



VI.] MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 117 

X 

say, that the allegation, whatever villain has made it, is a 
lie ! To the British Constitution, on revolution principles, 
next after my God, I am most devoutly attached. You, 
sir, have been much and generously my friend. — Heaven 
knows how warmly I have felt the obligation, and how 
gratefully I have thanked you. Fortune, sir, has made you 
powerful, and me impotent — has given you patronage, 
and me dependence. I would not, for my single self, call 
on your humanity ; were such my insular, unconnected 
situation, I would despise the tear that now swells in my 
eye. I would brave misfortune — I could face ruin, for at 
the worst Death's thousand doors stand open ; but — the 
tender concerns that I have mentioned, the claims and 
ties that I see at this moment, and feel around me, how 
they unnerve courage and wither resolution ! To your 
patronage, as a man of some genius, you have allowed me 
a claim ; and your esteem, as an honest man, I know is 
my due. To these, sir, permit me to appeal ; by these 
may I adjure you to save me from that misery which 
threatens to overwhelm me, and which — with my latest 
breath I will say it — I have not deserved. R. B." 

That this appeal was not without effect may be gathered 
from a letter on this same affair, which Burns addressed 
on the 13th April, 1793, to Mr. Erskine, of Mar, in which 
he says one of the supervisors-general, a Mr. Corbet, " was 
instructed to inquire on the spot, and to document me that 
my business was to act, not to think : and that, whatever 
might be men or measures, it was for me to be sile7it and 
obedient.''^ 

Much obloquy has been heaped upon the Excise Board 
—but on what grounds of justice I have never been able 
to discover — for the way in which they on this occasion 



148 ROHERT liURNS. [chap. 

dealt with Burns. The members of the Board were the 
servants of the Government, to wliich they were responsi- 
ble for the conduct of all their subordinates. To have al- 
lowed any of their subordinates to set themselves up by 
word or deed in opposition to the Ministry, and especially 
at such a crisis, was inconsistent with the ideas of the time 
as to official duty. And when called on to act, it is hard 
to see how they could have done so with more leniency 
than by hinting to him the remonstrance which so alarmed 
and irritated the recipient of it. Whatever may be said 
of his alarm, his irritation, if perhaps natural, was not rea- 
sonable. No man has a right to expect that, because he 
is a genius, he shall be absolved from those rules of con- 
duct, either in private or in public life, which are held 
binding on his more commonplace brethren. About tlie 
time when he received this rebuke, he wrote to Mrs. Dun- 
lop, " I have set, henceforth, a seal on my lips as to these 
unlucky politics." But neither his own resolve nor the 
remonstrance of the Excise Board seem to have weighed 
much with him. He continued at convivial parties to ex- 
press his feelings freely ; and at one of these, shortly after 
he had been rebuked by the Excise Board, when the health 
of William Pitt was drunk, he followed it by craving a 
bumper " to the health of a much better man — General 
Washington." And on a subsequent occasion, as we shall 
see, he brought himself into trouble by giving an inju- 
dicious toast. The repression brought to bear on Burns 
cannot have been very stringent when he was still free to 
sport such sentiments. The worst effect of the remon- 
strance he received seems to have been to irritate his tem- 
per, and to depress his spirits by the conviction, unfounded 
though it was, that all hope of promotion for him was 
over. 



VI.] MIGRATiOX TO DUMFRIES. 149 

But amid all the troubles entailed on him by his con- 
duct, domestic, social, and political, the chief refuge and 
solace which he found was in exercising his gifts of song. 
All hope of his ever achieving a great poem, which called 
for sustained effort, was now over. Even poems descrip- 
tive of rustic life and characters, such as he had sketched 
in his Ayrshire days — for these he had now no longer 
either time or inclination. His busy and distracted life, 
however, left him leisure from time to time to give vent 
to his impulses, or to soothe his feelings by short arrow- 
flights of song. He found in his own experience the truth 
of those words of another poet — 

" They can make who fail to find 
Short leisure even in busiest days, 
Moments to cast a look behind, 
And profit by those kindly rays 
*Which through the clouds will sometimes steal, 
And all the far-off past reveal." 

Such breaks in the clouds he eagerly waited for, and 
turned every golden gleam to song. 

It may be remembered that while Burns was in Edin- 
burgh he became acquainted with James Johnson, who 
was engaged in collecting the songs of Scotland in a work 
called the Musical Museum. He had at once thrown him- 
self ardently into Johnson's undertaking, and put all his 
power of traditional knowledge, of criticism, and of orig- 
inal composition at Johnson's disposal. This he continued 
to do through all the Ellisland period, and more or less 
during his residence in Dumfries. To the Museum Burns 
from first to last gratuitously contributed not less than 
one hundred and eighty -four songs, original, altered, or 
collected. 

Durino; the first vear that Burns lived in Dumfries, in 



150 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

September, 1792, he reeeived an itivitatiuu from Mr. George 
Thomson to lend the aid of his lyrical genius to a collec- 
tion of Scottish melodies, airs, and words, which a small 
band of musical amateurs in Edinburgh were then project- 
ing. This collection was pitched to a higher key than the 
comparatively humble Museum. It was to be edited with 
more rigid care, the symphonies and accompaniments were 
to be supplied by the first musicians of Europe, and it was 
to be expurgated from all leaven of coarseness, and from 
whatever could offend the purest taste. To Thomson's 
proposal Burns at once replied, " As the request you make 
to me will positively add to my enjoyment in complying 
with it, I shall enter into your undertaking with all the 
small portion of abilities I have, strained to their utmost 
exertion by the impulse of enthusiasm. . . . 

" If you are for English verses, there is, on my part, an 
end of the matter. Whether in the simplicity of the bal- 
lad, or the pathos of the song, I can only hope to please 
myself in being allowed at least a sprinkling of our native 
tongue. ... As to remuneration, you may think my songs 
either above or below price ; for they shall be absolutely^ 
the one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which 
I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, 
hire, &c., would be downright prostitution of soul." 

In this spirit he entered on the enterprise which Thom- 
son opened before him, and in this spii'it he worked at it 
to the last, pouring forth song after song almost to his 
latest breath. Hardly less interesting than the songs them- 
selves, which from time to time he sent to Thomson, were 
the letters with which he accompanied them. In these his 
judgment and critical power are as conspicuous as his gen- 
ius and his enthusiasm for the native melodies. For all 
who take interest in songs and in the laws which govern 



VI.] MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 151 

their movement, I know not where else they would find 
hints so valuable as in these occasional remarks on his own 
and others' songs, by the greatest lyric singer whom the 
modern world has seen. 

The bard who furnished the English songs for this col- 
lection was a certain Dr. Wolcot, known as Peter Pindar. 
This poetizer, who seems to have been wholly devoid of 
genius, but to have possessed a certain talent for hitting 
the taste of the hour, was then held in high esteem ; he 
has long since been forgotten. Even Burns speaks of him 
with much respect. "The very name of Peter Pindar is 
an acquisition to your work," he writes to Thomson. Well 
might Chambers say, "It is a humiliating thought that Pe- 
ter Pindar was richly pensioned by the booksellers, while 
Burns, the true sweet singer, lived in comparative pov^er-* 
ty." Hard measure l^as been dealt to Thomson for not hav- 
ing liberally remunerated Burns for the priceless treasures 
which he supplied to the Collection. Chambers and oth- 
ers, who have thoroughly examined the whole matter, have 
shown this censure to be undeserved. Thomson himself 
was by no means rich, and his work brought him nothing 
but outlay as long as Burns lived. Indeed once, in July, 
1*793, when Thomson had sent Burns some money in re- 
turn for his songs, the bard thus replied : 

" I assure you, my dear sir, that you truly hurt me with 
your pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. 
However, to return it would savour of affectation ; but, 
as to any more traffic of that debtor and creditor kind, I 
swear, by that honour which crowns the upright statue 
of Robert Burns's Integrity^ on the least motion of it, I 
will indignantly spurn the by-pact transaction, and from 
that moment commence entire stranger to you. Burns's 
character for generosity of sentiment and independence of 



152 ROBERT BURNS. [chap vi. 

mind will, I trust, long outlive any of his wants which the 
cold, unfeeling ore can supply ; at least I will take care 
that such a character he shall deserve." 

This sentiment was no doubt inconsistent, and may be 
deemed Quixotic, when we remember that for his poems 
Burns was quite willing to accept all that Creech would 
offer. Yet one cannot but lion our it. He felt that both 
Johnson and Thomson were enthusiasts, labouring to em- 
balm in a permanent form their country's minstrelsy, and 
that they were doing this without any hope of profit. He 
too would bear his part in the noble work ; if he had not 
in other respects done full justice to his great gifts, in this 
way he would repay some of the debt he owed to his 
country, by throwing into her national melodies the whole 
wealth and glory of his genius. And this he would do, 
" all for love, and nothing for reward." And the con- 
tinual effort to do this worthily was the chief relaxation 
and delight of those sad later years. When he died, he 
had contributed to Thomson's work sixty songs, but of 
these only six had then appeared, as only one half-volume 
of Thomson's work had then been published. Burns 
had given Thomson the copyright of all the sixty songs ; 
but as soon as a posthumous edition of the poet's works 
was proposed, Thomson returned all the songs to the 
poet's family, to be included in the forthcoming edition, 
along with the interesting letters which had accompanied 
the songs. Thomson's collection was not completed till 
1841, when the sixth and last volume of it appeared. It 
is affecting to know that Thomson himself, who was older 
than Burns by two years, survived him for more than five- 
and-fifty, and died in February, 1851, at the ripe old age 
of ninety-four. 



CHAPTER VII. 

LAST YEARS. 

During those Dumfries years little is to be done by the 
biographer but to trace the several incidents in Burns's 
quarrel with the world, his growling exasperation, and the 
evil effects of it on his conduct and his fortunes. It is a 
painful record, but since it must be given, it shall be with 
as much brevity as is consistent with truth. 

In July, 1793, Burns made an excursion into Galloway, 
accompanied by a Mr. Syme, who belonging, like himself, 
to the Excise, admired the poet, and agreed with his poli- 
tics. Syme has preserved a record of this journey, and 
the main impression left by the perusal of it is the strange 
access of ill-temper which had come over Burns, who kept 
venting his spleen in epigrams on all whom he disliked, 
high and low. They visited Kenmure, where lived Mr. 
Gordon, the representative of the old Lords Kenmure. 
They passed thence over the muirs to Gatehouse, in a 
wild storm, during which Burns was silent, and crooning 
to himself what, Syme says, was the first thought of Scots 
ivha hae. They were engaged to go to St. Mary's Isle, 
the seat of the Earl of Selkirk ; but Burns was in snch a 
savage mood against all lords, that he was with difficulty 
persuaded to go thither, though Lord Selkirk was no Tory, 
but a Whig, like himself, and the father of his old friend, 
Lord Daer, by this time deceased, who had first convinced 



.54 ROBERT BURxX^. 



LCHAP. 



liiiii that a lord might possibly be an honest and Kind- 
hearted man. When they were once under the hospitable 
roof of St. Mary's Isle, the kindness with which they were 
received appeased the poet's bitterness. The Earl was be- 
nign, the young ladies were beautiful, and two of them 
sang Scottish songs charmingly. Urbani, an ItaHan mu- 
sician who had edited Scotch music, was there, and sang 
many Scottish melodies, accompanying them with instru- 
mental music. Burns recited some of his songs amid the 
deep silence that is most expressive of admiration. The 
evening passed very pleasantly, and the lion of the morn- 
ing had, ere the evening was over, melted to a lamb. 

Scots wha hae has been mentioned. Mr. Syme tells us 
that it was composed partly while Burns was riding in a 
storm between Gatehouse and Kenrnure, and partly on the 
second morning after this, when they were journeying 
from St. Mary's Isle to Dumfries. And Mr. Syme adds 
that next day the poet presented him with one copy of 
the poem for himself, and a second for Mr. Dalzell. Mr. 
Carlyle says, '' This Dithyrambic was composed on horse- 
back ; in riding in the middle of tempests over the wild- 
est Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, 
observing the poet's looks, forbore to speak — judiciously 
enough — for a man composing Bruce's address might be 
unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn was 
singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns, 
but to the external ear it should be sung with the throat 
of the whirlwind," 

Burns, however, in a letter to Mr. Thomson, dated Sep- 
tember, 1793, gives an account of the composition of his 
war-ode, which is difficult to reconcile with Mr. Syme's 
statement. " There is a tradition which I have met with 
ill many places in Scotland," he writes, "that the old air, 



vir.] LAST YP:AR8. 155 

Hey, tuttie taitie, was Robert Bruce's march at the battle 
of Bannockburn. This thought, in my yesternight's even- 
ing walk, warmed me to a pitch of enthusiasm on the 
theme of liberty and independence, which I threw into a 
kind of Scottish ode, fitted to the air, that one might sup- 
pose to be the gallant royal Scot's address to his heroic 
followers on that eventful morning." He adds that "the 
accidental recollection of that glorious struggle for free- 
dom, associated with the glowing ideas of some struggles 
of the same nature, not quite so ancient, roused my rhym- 
ing mania." So Bruce^s Address owes its inspiration as 
much to Burns's sympathy' with the French Republicans 
as to his Scottish patriotism. As to the intrinsic merit of 
the ode itself, Mr. Carlyle says, " So long as there is warm 
blood in the heart of Scotchmen or man, it will move in 
fierce thrills under this war-ode, the best, we believe, that 
was ever written by any pen." To this verdict every son 
of Scottish soil is, I suppose, bound to say Amen. It ought 
not, however, to be concealed that there has been a very 
different estimate formed of it by judges sufficiently compe- 
tent. I remember to have read somewhere of a conversa- 
tion between Wordsworth and Mrs. Hemans, in which they 
both agreed that the famous ode was not much more than 
a commonplace piece of school -boy rhodomontade about 
liberty. Probably it does owe not a little of its power to 
the music to which it is sung, and to the associations 
which have gathered round it. The enthusiasm for French 
Revolution sentiments, which may have been in Burns's 
mind when composing it, has had nothing to do with the 
delight with which thousands since have sung and listened 
to it. The poet, however, when he first conceived it, was 
no doubt raging inwardly, like a lion, not only caged, but 
muzzled with the o-ao- Qf \^[^ servitude to Government. 



156 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

But for this, what diatribes in favour of the Revolution 
might we not have had, and what pain must it have been 
to Burns to suppress these under the coercion of exter- 
nal authority ! Partly to this feeling, as well as to other 
causes, may be ascribed such outbursts as the following, 
written to a female correspondent, immediately after his 
return from the Galloway tour : 

" There is not among all the martyrologies that ever 
were penned, so rueful a narrative as the lives of the 
poets. In the comparative view of wretches, the criterion 
is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are 
formed to bear. Take a being of our kind, give him a 
stronger imagination, and a more delicate sensibility, which 
between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set 
of passions than are the usual lot of man ; implant in him 
an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, ... in short, 
send him adrift after some pursuit which shall eternally 
mislead him from the paths of lucre, and yet curse him 
with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures 
that lucre can purchase ; lastly, fill up the measure of his 
woes by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own 
dignity — and you have created a wight nearly as misera- 
ble as a poet." This passage will recall to many the cata- 
logue of sore evils to which poets are by their tempera- 
ment exposed, which Wordsworth in his Leech-gatherer 

enumerates. 

" The fear that kills, 
And hope that is unwilling to be fed ; 
Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills ; 
And mighty poets in their misery dead." 

In writing that poem Wordsworth had Burns among 
others prominently in his eye. What a commentary is 
the life of the inore impulsive poet on the lines of his 



vii.j LAST YEARS. 167 

younger and more self-controlling* brother ! Daring those 
years of political unrest and of growing mental disquiet, 
his chief solace was, as I have said, to compose songs for 
Thomson's Collection, into which he poured a continual 
supply. Indeed it is wonderful how often he was able to 
escape from his own vexations into that serener atmosphere, 
and there to suit melodies and moods most alien to his 
own with fitting words. 

Here in one of his letters to Thomson is the way he de- 
scribes himself in the act of composition. " My way is — 
I consider the poetic sentiment correspondent to my idea 
of the musical expression ; then choose my theme ; begin 
one stanza ; when that is composed, which is generally the 
most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down 
now and then, look out for objects in nature around me 
that are in unison and harmony with the cogitations of 
my fancy and workings of my bosom ; humming every 
now and then the air with the verses I have framed. 
When I feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the 
solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effu- 
sions to paper; swinging at intervals on the hind legs of 
my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical 
strictures as my pen goes on." To this may be added 
what Allan Cunningham tells us. "AVhile he lived in 
Dumfries he had three favourite walks — on the Dock- 
green by the river-side ; among the ruins of Lincluden 
College; and towards the Martingdon-ford, on the north 
side of the Nith. This latter place was secluded, com- 
manded a view of the distant hills and the romantic tow- 
ers of Lincluden, and afforded soft greensward banks to 
rest upon, within sight and sound of the stream. As soon 
as he was heard to hum to himself, his wife saw that he 
had something in his mind, and was prepared to see him 



158 K0I3EUT BUKNS. [chap. 

snatch up his hat, and set silently off for his nuising- 
ground. When by himself, and in the open air, his ideas 
arranged themselves in their natural order — words came 
at will, and he seldom returned without having finished a 
song. . . . When the verses were finished, he passed them 
through the ordeal of Mrs. Burns's voice, listened atten- 
tively when she sang ; asked her if any of the words were 
difficult ; and when one happened to be too rough, he read- 
ily found a smoother ; but he never, save at the resolute 
entreaty of a scientific musician, sacrificed sense to sound. 
The autumn was his favourite season, and the twilight his 
favourite hour of study." 

Regret has often been expressed that Burns spent so 
much time and thought on writing his songs, and, in this 
way, diverted his energies from higher aims. Sir Walter 
has said, "Notwithstanding the spirit of many of his lyrics, 
and the exquisite sweetness and simplicity of others, we 
cannot but deeply regret that so much of his time and 
talents was frittered away in compiling and composing for 
musical collections. There is sufficient evidence that even 
the genius of Burns could not support him in the monot- 
onous task of writing love-verses, on heaving bosoms and 
sparkling eyes, and twisting them into such rhythmical 
forms as might suit the capricious evolutions of Scotch 
reels and strathspeys." Even if Burns', instead of continual 
song-writing during the last eight years of his life, had 
concentrated his strength on " his grand plan of a dramat- 
ic composition " on the subject of Bruce's adventures, it 
may be doubted whether he would have done so much to 
enrich his country's literature as he has done by the songs 
he composed. But considering how desultory his habits 
became, if Johnson and Thomson had not, as it were, set 
him a congenial task, he might not have produced any- 



Ml.] LAST YEARS. in^ 

thing at all during' ttiose years. There is, howcwn', anoth- 
er aspect in which the continual composition of love-ditties 
must be regretted. The few genuine love-songs, straight 
from the heart, which he composed, such as Of a' the 
Airts, To Mart/ In Heaven, Ye Banks and Braes, can hard- 
ly be too highly prized. But there are many others^ 
which arose from a lower and fictitious source of inspira- 
tion. He himself tells Thomson that when he wished to 
compose a love-song, his recipe was to put himself on a 
" regimen of admiring a beautiful woman.*" This was a 
dangerous regimen, and when it came to be often repeated^ 
as it was. it cannot have tended to his peace of heart, or to 
the purity of his life. 

The first half of the year 1794 was a more than usually 
unhappy time with Burns. It was almost entirely song- 
less. Instead of poetry, we hear of political dissatisfaction, 
excessive drinking-bouts, quarrels, and self-reproach. This 
was the time when our country was at war with tlie 
French Republic — a war which Burns bitterly disliked, but 
his employment under Government forced him to set " a 
seal oU'his lips as to those unlucky politics." A regiment 
of soldiers was quartered in the town of Dumfries, and to 
Burns's eye the sight of their red coats was so offensive^ 
that he would not go down the plainstones lest he should 
meet " the epauletted puppies," who thronged the street; 
One of these epauletted puppies, whom he so disliked, 
found occasion to pull Burns up rather smartly. The 
poet, when in his cup% had in the hearing of a certain cap-^ 
tain proposed as a toast, '' May our success in the present 
war be equal to the justice of our cause." The soldier 
called him to account — a duel seemed imminent, and 
Burns had next day to write an apologetic letter, in order 
to avoid the risk of ruin. About the same time he was 



IGO ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

involved, through intemperance, in another and more pain- 
ful quarrel. It has been already noticed that at Wood- 
ley Park he was a continual guest. With Mrs. Riddel, 
who was both beautiful and witty, he carried on a kind of 
poetic flirtation. Mr. Walter Riddel, the host, was wont 
to press his guests to deeper potations than were usual 
even in those hard-drinking days. One evening, when the 
guests had sat till they were inflamed with wine, they en- 
tered the drawing-room, and Burns in some way grossly 
insulted the fair hostess. Next day he wrote a letter of 
the most abject and extravagant penitence. This, how- 
ever, Mr. and Mrs. Riddel did not think flt to accept. 
Stung by this rebuff, Burns recoiled at once to the oppo- 
site extreme of feeling, and penned a grossly scurrilous 
monody on " a lady famed for her caprice." This he fol- 
lowed up by other lampoons, full of " coarse rancour 
against a lady who had showed him many kindnesses." 
The Laird of Friars Carse and his lady naturally sided 
with their relatives, and grew cold to their old friend of 
EUisland. While this coldness lasted, Mr. Riddel, of Friars 
Carse, died in the spring-time, and the poet, remembering 
his friend's worth and former kindness, wrote a sonnet 
over him — not one of his best or most natural perform- 
ances, yet showing the return of his better heart. During 
the same spring we hear of Burns going to the house of 
one of the neighbouring gentry, and dining there, not with 
the rest of the party, but, by his own choice, it would 
seem, with the housekeeper in her room, and joining the 
gentlemen in the dining-room after the ladies had retired. 
He was now, it seems, more disliked by ladies than by 
men — a change since those Edinburgh days, when the 
highest dames of the land had spoken so rapturously of 
the charm of liis conversation. 



Ml.] LAST YEARS. 161 

Amid the gloom of this unhappy time (l791), Burns 
turned to his old Edinburgh friend, Alexander Cunning- 
ham, and poured forth this passionate and well-known 
complaint: — "Canst thou minister to a mind diseased? 
Canst thou speak peace and rest to a soul tossed on a sea 
of troubles, without one friendly star to guide her course, 
and dreading that the next surge may overwhelm her? 
Of late, a number of domestic vexations, and some pecun- 
iary share in the ruin of these cursed times — losses which, 
though trifling, were what I could ill bear — have so ir- 
ritated me, that my feelings at times could only be envied 
by a reprobate spirit listening to the sentence that dooms 
it to perdition. — Are you deep in the language of consola- 
tion? I have exhausted in reflection every topic of com- 
fort. A heart at ease would have been charmed with my 
sentiments and reasonings; but as to myself, I was like 
Judas Iscariot preaching the Gospel. . . . Still there are 
two great pillars that bear us up amid the wreck of mis- 
fortune and misery. The one is composed of a certain 
noble, stubborn something in man, known by the names 
of Courage, Fortitude, Magnanimity. The other is made 
up of those feelings and sentiments which, however the 
sceptic may deny them, or the enthusiast may disfigure 
them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component 
parts of the human soul, those senses of the mind — if I 
may be allowed the expression — which connect us with 
and link us to those awful obscure realities — an all-power- 
ful and equally beneficent God, and a world to come, be- 
yond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of 
combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field : the last 
pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time 
can never cure." 

This remarkable, or, as Lockhart calls it, noble letter, 
8 



162 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

was written on February 25, 1794. It was probably a few 
months later, perhaps in May of the same year, while 
Burns was still under this depression, that there occurred 
an affecting incident, which has been preserved by Lock- 
hart. Mr. David McCulloch, of Ardwell, told Lockhart, 
*' that he was seldom more grieved than wnen, riding into 
Dumfries one fine summer's evening, to attend a country 
ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side of the 
principal street of the town, while the opposite part was 
gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all 
drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of 
whom seemed willing to recognize the poet. The horse- 
man dismounted and joined Burns, who, on his propos- 
ing to him to cross the street, said, ' Nay, nay, my young 
friend, that's all over now ;' and quoted, after a pause, some 
verses of Lady Grizzell Baillie's pathetic ballaC : 

*' ' His bonnet stood ance f u' fair on his brow, 

His auld ane looked better than mony ane's new ; 
But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, 
• And casts hirasell dowie upon the corn-bing. 

" ' 0, were we young, as we ance hae been, 

We suld hae been galloping down on yon green, 
And linking it owre the lily-white lea — 
And werena my heart light, I wad die.' " 

" It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on 
certain subjects escape in this fashion. He immediately 
after citing these verses assumed the sprightliness of his 
most pleasing manner ; and taking his young friend home 
with him, entertained him very agreeably until the hour 
of the ball arrived, with a bowl of his usual potation, and 
Bonnie Jean's singing of some verses which he had recent- 
ly composed." 



Ml.] LAST YEARS. " 163 

In June we find him expressing to Mrs. Dunlop the 
earliest hint that he felt his health declining. " I am 
afraid," he says, " that I am about to suffer for the follies 
of my youth. My medical friends threaten me with fly- 
ing gout ; but I trust they are mistaken." And again, a 
few months later, we find him, when writing to the same 
friend, recurring to the same apprehensions. Vexation 
and disappointment within, and excesses, if not continual, 
yet too frequent, from without, had for long been under- 
mining his naturally strong but nervously sensitive frame, 
and fhose symptoms were now making themselves felt, 
which were soon to lay him in an early grave. As the 
autumn drew on, his singing powers revived, and till the 
close of the year he kept pouring into Thomson a stream 
of songs, some of the highest stamp, and hardly one with- 
out a touch such as only the genuine singer can give. 

The letters, too, to Thomson, with which he accompanies 
his gifts, are full of suggestive thoughts on song, hints 
most precious to all who care for such matters. For the 
forgotten singers of his native land he is full of sympathy. 
" By the way," he writes to Thomson, "are you not vexed 
to think that those men of genius, for such they certainly 
were, who composed our fine Scottish lyrics, should be un- 
known ?" 

Many of the songs of that autumn were, as usual, love- 
ditties ; but when the poet could forget the lint-white 
locks of Chloris, of which kind of stuff there is more than 
enough, he would write as good songs on other and manlier 
subjects. Two of these, written, the one in November, 
1794, the other in January, 1795, belong to the latter or- 
der, and are worthy of careful regard, not only for their 
excellence as songs, but also as illustrations of the poet's 
inood of mind at the time when he composed them. 



104 . ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

The first is this — 

" Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair, 
Whene'er I forgather wi' sorrow and care, 
I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang, 
Wi' a cog o' gude swats, and an auld Scottish sang. 

' I whyles claw the elbow o' troublesome thought ; 
But man is a soger, and life is a faught : 
My mirth and gude humour are coin in my pouch. 
And my Freedom's my lairdship nae monarch dare touch. 

" A towmond o' trouble, should that be my fa', 
A night o' gude fellowship sowthers it a' ; 
When at the blythe end o' our journey at last, 
Wha the deil ever thinks o' the road he has past ? 

" Blind Chance, let her snapper and stoyte on her way ; 
Be't to me, be't frae me, e'en let the jade gae : 
Come Ease, or come Travail, come Pleasure or Pain, 
My warst word is — Welcome, and welcome again." 

This song gives Burns's idea of himself, and of his strug- 
gle with the world, when he could look on both from the 
placid, rather than the despondent side. He regarded it 
as a true picture of himself ; for, when a good miniature 
of him had been done, he wrote to Thomson that he wish- 
ed a vignette from it to be prefixed to this song, that, in 
his own words, " the portrait of my face and the picture 
of my mind may go down the stream of time together." 
Burns had more moods of mind than most men, and this 
was, we may hope, no unfrequent one with him. But if 
we would reach the truth, we probably ought to strike a 
balance between the spirit of this song and the dark moods 
depicted in some of those letters already quoted. 

The other song of the same time is the well-known A 
Man's a Man for a' that. This powerful song speaks out 



VII.] LAST YEARS. 165 

in his best style a sentiment that through all his life had 
been dear to the heart of Burns. It has been quoted, they 
say, by Beranger in France, and by Goethe in Germany, 
and is the word which springs up in the mind of all for- 
eigners when they think of Burns. It was inspired, no 
doubt, by his keen sense of social oppression, quickened 
to white heat by influences that had lately come from 
France, and by what he had suffered for his sympathy 
with that cause. It has since become the watchword of 
all w^ho fancy that they have secured less, and others more, 
of this world's goods than their respective merit deserves. 
Strono-er words he never wrote. 



'&" 



" The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
The man's the gowd for a' that." 

That is a word for all time. Yet perhaps it might have 
been wished that so noble a song had not been marred by 
any touch of social bitterness. A lord, no doubt, may be 
a " birkie " and a " coof," but may not a ploughman be 
so too ? This great song Burns wrote on the first day of 
1795. 

Towards the end of 1794, and in the opening of 1795, 
the panic which had filled the land in 1792, from the do- 
ings of the French republicans, and their sympathizers in 
this country, began to abate ; and the blast of Government 
displeasure, which for a time had beaten heavily on Burns, 
seemed to have blown over. He writes to Mrs. Dunlop on 
the 29th of December, 1794, "My political sins seem to be 
forgiven me ;" and as a proof of it he mentions that dur- 
ing the illness of his superior officer, he had been appoint- 
ed to act as supervisor — a duty which he discharged for 
about two months. In the same letter he sends to that 
good lady his usual kindly greeting for the coming year, 



16G ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

and concludes thus : — " What a transient business is life ! 
Very lately I was a boy ; but t' other day I was a young 
man ; and I already begin to feel the rigid fibre and stiff- 
ening joints of old age coming fast o'er my frame. With 
all the follies of youth, and, I fear, a few vices of man- 
hood, still I congratulate myself on having had, in early 
days, religion strongly impressed on my mind." Burns al- 
ways keeps his most serious thoughts for this good lady. 
Herself religious, she no doubt tried to keep the truths 
of religion before the poet's mind. And he naturally was 
drawn out to reply in a tone more unreserved than when 
he wrote to most others. 

In February of the ensuing year, 1795, his duties as su- 
pervisor led him to what he describes as the " unfortunate, 
wicked little village " of Ecclefechan, in Annandale, The 
night after he arrived, there fell the heaviest snow-storm 
known in Scotland within living memory. When people 
awoke next morning they found the snow up to the win- 
dows of the second story of their houses. In the hollow 
of Campsie hills it lay to the depth of from eighty to a 
hundred feet, and it had not disappeared from the streets 
of Edinburgh on the king's birthday, the 4th of June. 
Storm-stayed at Ecclefechan, Burns indulged in deep po- 
tations and in song-writing. Probably he imputed to the 
place that with which his own conscience reproached him- 
self. Currie, who was a native of Ecclefechan, much of- 
fended, says, " The poet must have been tipsy indeed to 
abuse sweet Ecclefechan at this rate." It was also the 
birthplace of the poet's friend Nicol, and of a greater than 
he. On the 4th of December in the very year on which 
Burns visited it, Mr. Thomas Carlyle was born in that vil- 
lage. Shortly after his visit, the poet beat his brains to 
find a rhyme for Ecclefechan, and to twist it into a song. 



ml] last years. 16Y 

In Marcli of the same year we find him again joining in 
local politics, and writing electioneering ballads for Heron 
of Heron, the Whig candidate for the Stewartry of Kirk-' 
cudbright, against the nominee of the Earl of Galloway, 
against whom and his family Burns seems to have har- 
boured some peculiar enmity. 

Mr. Heron won the election, and Burns wrote to him 
about his own prospects : — " The moment I am appointed 
supervisor, in the common routine I may be nominated on 
the collectors' list ; and this is always a business of pure- 
ly political patronage. A collectorship varies much, from 
better than 200Z. to near 1000/. a year. A life of literary 
leisure, with a decent competency, is the summit of my 
wishes." 

The hope here expressed was not destined to be fulfilled. 
It required some years for its realization, and the years al- 
lotted to Burns were now nearly numbered. The prospect 
which he here dwells on may, however, have helped to 
lighten his mental gloom during the last year of his life. 
For one year of activity there certainly was, betw^een the 
time when the cloud of political displeasure against him 
disappeared towards the end of 1*794, and the time when 
his health finally gave way in the autumn of 1795, during 
which, to judge by his letters, ho indulged much less in 
outbursts of social discontent. One proof of this is seen 
in the following fact. In the spring of 1795, a volunteer 
corps was raised in Dumfries, to defend the country, while 
the regular army was engaged abroad, in war with France. 
Many of the Dumfries Whigs, and among them Burns's 
friends, Syme and Dr. Maxwell, enrolled themselves in the 
corps, in order to prove their loyalty and. patriotism, on 
which some suspicions had previously been cast. Burns 
too offered himself, and was received iuto the corps. Al- 



168 ROBERT BURNF. [chap. 

Ian Cunningham remembered the appearance of the regi- 
ment, " their odd but not ungraceful dress ; white kersey- 
mere breeches and waistcoat ; short blue coat, faced with 
red ; and round hat, surmounted by a bearskin, like the 
helmets of the Horse Guards." He remembered the poet 
too, as he showed among them, " his very swarthy face, his 
ploughman stoop, his large dark eyes, and his awkward- 
ness in handling his arms." But if he could not handle 
his musket deftly, he could do what none else in that or 
any other corps could, he could sing a patriotic stave which 
thrilled the hearts not only of -his comrades, but every 
Briton from Land's End to Johnny Groat's. 
This is one of the verses : — 

"The kettle o' the kirk and state 

Perhaps a clout may fail in't ; 
But deil a foreign tinkler loun 

Shall ever ca' a nail in't. 
Our fathers' blude the kettle bought, 

And wha wad dare to spoil it ? 
By heavens ! the sacrilegious dog 

Shall fuel be to boil it ! 
By heavens ! the sacrilegious dog 

Shall fuel be to boil it !" 

This song flew throughout the land, hit the taste of the 
country-people everywhere, and is said to have done much 
to change the feelings of those who were disaffected. 
Much blame has been cast upon the Tory Ministry, then 
in power, for not having offered a pension to Burns. It 
was not, it is said, that they did not know of him, or that 
they disregarded his existence. For Mr. Addington, after- 
wards Lord Sidmouth, we have seen, deeply felt his gen- 
ius, acknowledged it in verse, and is said to have urged his 
claims upon the Government. Mr. l*itt, soon after the po- 



VII.] LAST YEARS. 16^» 

et's death, is reported to have said of Burns's poetry,' at 
the table of Lord Liverpool, " I can think of no verse since 
Shakespeare's that has so much the appearance of coming 
sweetly from nature." It is on Mr. Dundas, however, at 
that time one of the Ministry, and the autocrat of all Scot- 
tish affairs, that the heaviest weight of blame has fallen. 
But perhaps this is not altogether deserved. There is the 
greatest difference between a literary man, who holds his 
political opinions in private, but refrains from mingling 
in party politics, and one who zealously espouses one side, 
and employs his literary power in promoting it. He 
threw himself into every electioneering business with his 
whole heart, wrote, while he might have been better em- 
ployed, electioneering ballads of little merit, in which he 
lauded Whig men and theories, and lampooned, often scur- 
rilously, the supporters of Dundas. No doubt it would 
have been magnanimous in the men then in power to have 
overlooked all these things, and, condoning the politics, 
to have rewarded the poetry of Bums. And it were to be 
wished that such magnanimity were more common among 
public men. But we do not see it practised even at the 
present day, any more than it was in the time of Burns. 

During the first half of 1795 the poet had gone on with 
his accustomed duties, and, during the intervals of busi- 
ness, kept sending to Thomson the songs he from time to 
time composed. 

His professional prospects seemed at this time to be 
brightening, for about the middle of May, 1795, his 
staunch friend, Mr. Graham, of Fintray, would seem to 
have revived an earlier project of having him transferred 
to a post in Leith, with easy duty and an income of nearly 
200/. a year. This project could not at the time be car- 
ried out; but that it should ha\<' Iteeii thought of proves 

8* 



170 ROBERT BURNS. [rHAP. 

that political offences of the past were beginning to be 
forgotten. During this same year there were symptoms 
that the respectable persons who had for some time frown- 
ed on him were willing to relent. A combination of causes, 
his politics, the Riddel quarrel, and his own many impru- 
dences, had kept him under a cloud. And this disfavour 
of the well-to-do had not increased his self-respect or made 
him more careful about the company he kept. Disgust 
with the world had made him reckless and defiant. But 
with the opening of 1*795, the Riddels were reconciled to 
him, and received him once more into their good graces; 
and others, their friends, probably followed their example. 
But the time was drawing near when the smiles or the 
frowns of the Dumfries magnates would be alike indiffer- 
ent to him. There has been more than enough of discus- 
sion among the biographers of Burns as to how far he 
really deteriorated in himself during those Dumfries years, 
as to the extent and the causes of the social discredit into 
which he fell, and as to the charge that he took to low 
company. His early biographers — Currie, Walker, Heron 
— drew the picture somewhat darkly ; Lockhart and Cun- 
ningham have endeavoured to lighten the depth of the 
shadows. Chambers has laboured to give the facts impar- 
tially, has faithfully placed the lights and the shadows side 
by side, and has summed up the whole subject in an ap- 
pendix on The Reputation of Burns in his Later Years, 
to which I would refer any who desire to see this pain- 
ful subject minutely handled. Whatever extenuations 
or excuses may be alleged, all must allow that his course 
in Dumfries was on the whole a downward one, and must 
concur, however reluctantly, in the conclusion at which 
l/ockhart, while decrying the severe judgments of Currie, 
Heron, and otliers, is forced by truth to come, that "the 



VII.] LAST YEARS. Ill 

untiraely death of Burns was, it is too probable, hastened 
by his own intemperances and imprudences." To inquire 
minutely, what was the extent of those intemperances, and 
what the nature of those imprudences, is a subject which 
can little profit any one, and on which one has no heart 
to enter. If the general statement of fact be true, the 
minute details are better left to the kindly oblivion, which, 
but for too prying curiosity, would by this time have over- 
taken them. 

Dissipated his life for some years certainly had been — 
deeply disreputable many asserted it to be. Others, how- 
ever, there were who took a more lenient view of him. 
Findlater, his superior in the Excise, used to assert that 
no officer under him was more regular in his public duties. 
Mr. Gray, then teacher of Dumfries school, has left it on 
record, that no parent he knew watched more carefully 
over his children's education — that he had often found the 
poet in his home explaining to his eldest boy passages of 
the English poets from Shakespeare to Gray, and that the 
benefit of the father's instructions was apparent in the 
excellence of the son's daily school performances. This 
brighter side of the picture, however, is not irreconcilable 
with that darker one. For Burns's whole character was 
a compound of the most discordant and contradictory el- 
ements. Dr. Chambers has well shown that he who at 
one hour was the douce sober Mr. Burns, in the next was 
changed to the maddest of Bacchanals : now he was glow- 
ing with the most generous sentiments, now sinking to the 
very opposite extreme. 

One of the last visits paid to him by any friend from a 

distance would seem to have been by Professor Walker, 

although the date of it is somewhat uncertain. Eight 

years had passed since the Professor had parted with 
M 



172 HUBERT BURNS. [chap. 

Burns at Blair Castle, after the poet's happy visit there. 
In the account which the Professor has left of his two 
days' interview with Burns at Dumfries, there are traces 
of disappointment with the change which the intervening 
years had wrought. It has been alleged that prolonged 
residence in England had made the Professor fastidious, 
and more easily shocked with rusticity and coarseness. 
However this may be, he found Burns, as he thought, not 
improved, but more dictatorial, more free in his potations, 
more coarse and gross in his talk, than when he had for- 
merly known him. 

For some time past there had not been wanting symp- 
toms to show that the poet's strength was already past its 
prime. In June, 1794, he had, as we have seen, told Mrs. 
Dunlop that he had been in poor health, and was afraid 
he was beginning to suffer for the follies of his youth. 
His physicians threatened him, he said, with flying gout, 
but he trusted they were mistaken. In the spring of 1795, 
he said to one who called on him, that he was beginning 
to feel as if he were soon to be an old man. Still he went 
about all his usual employments. But during the latter 
part of that year his health seems to have suddenly de- 
clined. For some considerable time he was confined to a 
sick-bed. Dr. Currie, who was likely to be well informed, 
states that this illness lasted from October, 1795, till the 
following January. No details of his malady are given, 
and little more is known of his condition at this time, ex- 
cept what he himself has given in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop, 
and in a rhymed epistle to one of his brother Excisemen. 

At the close of the year he must have felt that, owing 
to his prolonged sickness, his funds were getting low. Else 
he would not have penned to his friend, Collector Mitchell, 
the following request : 



til] last years. 173 

*' Friend of the Poet, tried and leal, 
Wha, wanting thee, might beg or steal ; 
Alake, alake, the meikle deil 

Wi' a' his witches 
Are at it, skelpin' ! jig and reel, 

In my poor pouches. 

" I modestly fu fain wad hint it. 
That one pound one, I sairly want it ; 
If wi' the hizzie down ye sent it, 

It would be kind ; 
And while my heart wi' life-blood dunted, 
I'd bear't in mind. 
***** 

"postscript. 
" Ye've heard this while how I've been licket, 
And by fell death was nearly nicket : 
Grim loun ! he gat me by the fecket, 

And sair me sheuk ; 
But by gude luck I lap a wicket, 
And turn'd a neuk. 

" But by that health, I've got a share o't, 
And by that life, I'm promised mair o't, 
My heal and weel I'll take a care o't 

A tentier way : 
Then fareweel, folly, hide and hair o't. 

For ance and aye." 

It was, alas ! too late now to bid farewell to folly, even 
if he could have done so indeed. With the opening of 
the year 1796 he somewhat revived, and the prudent re- 
solve of his sickness disappeared with the first prospect of 
returning health. Chambers thus records a fact which 
the local tradition of Dumfries confirms : — " Early in the 
month of January, when his health was in the course of 
improvement. Burns tarried to a late hour at a jovial party 
in the Globe tavern. Before returning home, he unkickily 



174 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

remained for some time in the open air, and, overpowered 
by the effects of the liquor he had drunk, fell asleep. . . . 
A fatal chill penetrated his bones ; he r^ched home with 
the seeds of a rheumatic fever already in possession of his 
weakened frame. In this little accident, and not in the 
pressure of poverty or disrepute, or wounded feelings or a 
broken heart, truly lay the determining cause of the sadly 
shortened days of our national poet." 

How long this new access of extreme illness confined 
him seems uncertain. Currie says for about a week; 
Chambers surmises a longer time. Mr. Scott Douglas 
says, that from the close of January till the month of 
April, he seems to have moved about with some hope of 
permanent improvement. But if he had such a hope, it 
was destined not to be fulfilled. Writing on the 31st of 
January, 1*796, to Mrs. Dunlop, the trusted friend of so 
many confidences, this is the account he gives of himself : 

" I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The 
autumn robbed me of my only daughter and darling child, 
and that at a distance, too, and so rapidly as to put it out 
of my power to pay the last duties to her. I had scarcely 
begun to recover from that shock, when I became myself 
the victim of a most severe rheumatic fever, and long the 
die spun doubtful ; until, after many weeks of a sick-bed, 
it seems to have turned up life, and I am beginning to crawl 
across my room, and once indeed have been before my 
own door in the street." In these words Burns would 
seem to have put his two attacks together, as though they 
were but one prolonged illness. 

It was about this time that, happening to meet a neigh- 
bour in the street, the poet talked with her seriously of 
his health, and said among other things this : " T find that 
a man may live like a fool, but he will scarcely die like 



vTi.] LAST YEARS. 1*75 

one.'" As from time to time lie appeared on tlie street 
daring the early months of 1796, others of his old ac- 
quaintance were struck by the sight of a tall man of slov- 
enly appearance and sickly aspect, whom a second look 
showed to be Burns, and that he was dying. Yet in that 
February there were still some flutters of song, one of 
which Avas, Hey for the Lass lui'' a Tocher, written in an- 
swer to Thomson's beseeching inquiry if he was never to 
hear from him again. Another was a rhymed epistle, in 
which he answers the inquiries of the colonel of his Vol- 
unteer Corps after his health. 

From about the middle of April, Burns seldom left his 
room, and for a great part of each day was confined to 
bed. May came — a beautiful May — and it was hoped 
that its genial influences might revive him. But while 
young Jeffrey was writing, " It is the finest weather in the 
world — the whole country is covered with green and blos- 
soms ; and the sun shines perpetually through a light east 
wind," Burns was shivering at every breath of the breeze. 
At this crisis his faithful wife was laid aside, unable to at- 
tend him. But a young neighbour, Jessie Levvars, sister 
of a brother exciseman, came to their house, assisted in all 
household work, and ministered to the dying poet. She 
was at this time only a girl, but she lived to be a wife and 
mother, and to see an honoured old age. Whenever we 
think of the last days of the poet, it is well to remember 
one who did so much to smooth his dying pillow. 

Burns himself was deeply grateful, and his gratitude as 
usual found vent in song. But the old manner still clung 
to him. Even then he could not express his gratitude to 
his young benefactress without assuming the tone of a 
fancied lover. Two songs in this strain he addressed to 
Jessie Lewars. Of the second of these it is told, that one 



ne ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

morning the poet said to her that if she would play to 
him any favourite tune for which she desired to have new 
words, he would do his best to meet her wish. She sat 
down at the piano, and played over several times the air 
of an old song beginning thus : 

" The robin cam to the wren's nest, 
And keekit in, and keekit in." 

As soon as Burns had taken in the melody, he set to, 
and in a few minutes composed these beautiful words, the 
second of the sono^s which he addressed to Jessie: 

" Oh ! wert thou in the cauld blast, 

On yonder lea, on yonder lea. 
My plaidie to the angry airt, 

I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee. 
Or did misfortune's bitter storms 

Around thee blaw, around thee blaw, 
Thy bield should be my bosom, 

To share it a', to share it a'. 

" Or were I in the wildest waste, 

Sae black and bare, sae black and bare, 
The desert were a paradise. 

If thou wert there, if thou wert there: 
Or were I monarch o' the globe, 

Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign. 
The brightest jewel in my crown 

Wad be my queen, wad be my queen." 

Mendelssohn is said to have so much admired this song, 
that he composed for it what Chambers pronounces an air 
of exquisite pathos. 

June came, but brought no improvement, rather rapid 
decline of health. On the 4th of July (1796) he wrote to 
Johnson, " Many a merry meeting this publication (the 



vir] LAST YEARS. 177 

Museum) has given us, and possibly it may give us more, 
though, alas I I fear it. This protracting, slow consuming 
illness will, I doubt much, my ever dear friend, arrest my 
sun before he has reached his middle career, and will turn 
over the poet to far more important concerns than study- 
ing the brilliancy of wit or the pathos of sentiment." On 
the day on which he wrote these words, he left Dumfries 
for a lonely place called Brow, on the Sol way shore, to try 
the effects of sea-bathing. He went alone, for his wife 
was unable to accompany him. While he was at Brow, 
his former friend, Mrs. Walter Riddel, to whom, after their 
estrangement, he had been reconciled, happened to be stay- 
ing, for the benefit of her health, in the neighbourhood. 
She asked Burns to dine with her, and sent her carriage 
to bring him to her house. This is part of the account 
she gives of that interview : 

" I was struck with his appearance on entering the room. 
The stamp of death was imprinted on his features. He 
seemed already touching the brink of eternity. His first 
salutation was, ' Well, madam, have you any commands for 
the other world V I replied that it seemed a doubtful case 
which of us should be there soonest, and that I hoped he 
would yet live to write my epitaph. He looked in my face 
with an air of great kindness, and expressed his concern 
at seeing me look so ill, with his accustomed sensibility. 
. . . We had a long and serious conversation about his 
present situation, and the approaching termination of all 
his earthly prospects. He spoke of his death without any 
of the ostentation of philosophy, but with firmness as well 
as feeling, as an event likely to happen very soon, and 
which gave him concern chiefly from leaving his four chil- 
dren so young and unprotected, and his wife hourly ex- 
pecting a fifth. He mentioned, with seeming pride and 



178 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

satisfaction, the promising genius of his eldest son, and 
the flattering marks of approbation he had received from 
his teachers, and dwelt particularly on his hopes of that, 
boy's future conduct and merit. His anxiety for his fam- 
ily seemed to hang heavy on him, and the more perhaps 
from the reflection that he had not done them all the jus- 
tice he was so well qualified to do. Passing from this 
subject, he showed great concern about the care of his lit- 
erary fame, and particularly the publication of his post- 
humous works. He said he was well aware that his death 
would create some noise, and that every scrap of his writ- 
ing would be revived against him to the injury of his fut- 
ure reputation ; that his letters and verses written with 
unguarded and improper freedom, and which he earnest- 
ly wished to have buried in oblivion, would be handed 
about by idle vanity or malevolence, when no dread of 
his resentment would restrain them, or prevent the cen- 
sures of shrill-tongued malice, or the insidious sarcasms 
of envy, from pouring forth all their venom to blast his 
fame. 

" He lamented that he had written many epigrams on 
persons against whom he entertained no enmity, and whose 
characters he would be sorry to wound; and many indif- 
ferent poetical pieces, which he feared would now, with all 
their imperfections on their head, be thrust upon the world. 
On this account he deeply regretted having deferred to put 
his papers in a state of arrangement, as he was now inca- 
pable of the exertion. . . . The conversation," she adds, 
" was kept up with great evenness and animation on his 
side. I had seldom seen his mind greater or more collect- 
ed. There was frequently a considerable degree of vivacity 
in his sallies, and they would probably have had a greater 
share, had not the concern and dejection T could not dis- 



VII.] LAST YEARS. 179 

guise damped the spirit of pleasantry he seemed not un- 
willino' to indulo'e. 

" We parted about sunset on the evening of that day 
(the 5th July, 1796); the next day I saw him again, and 
we parted to meet no more !" 

It is not wonderful that Burns should have felt some 
anxiety about the literary legacy he was leaving to man- 
kind. Not about his best poems; these, he must have 
known, would take care of themselves. Yet even among 
the poems which he had published with his name, were 
some " which dying " he well might " wish to blot." There 
lay among his papers letters too, and other " fallings from 
him," which he no doubt would have desired to suppress, 
but of which, if they have not all been made public, enough 
have appeared to justify his fears of that idle vanity, if not 
malevolence, which, after his death, would rake up every 
scrap he had written, uncaring how it might injure his 
good name, or affect future generations of his admirers. 
No poet perhaps has suffered more from the indiscriminate 
and unscrupulous curiosity of editors, catering too greedily 
for the public, than Burns has done. 

Besides anxieties of this kind, he, during those last days, 
had to bear another burden of care that pressed even more 
closely home. To pain of body, absence from his wife and 
children, and haunting anxiety on their account, was added 
the pressure of some small debts and the fear of want. By 
the rules of the Excise, his full salary would riot be allowed 
him during his illness; and though the Board agreed to 
continue Burns in his full pay, he never knew this in time 
to be comforted by it. With his small income diminished, 
how could he meet the increased expenditure caused by 
sickness ? We have seen how at the beginning of the year 
he had written to his friend Mitchell to ask the loan of a 



ISO JiOBERT BURNS. [chap. 

guinea. One or two letters, asking for the payment of 
some old debts due to him by a former companion, still 
remain. During his stay at Brow, on the 12th of July, he 
wrote to Thomson the following memorable letter : 

"After all my boasted independence, curst necessity 
compels me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel 
scoundrel of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, 
taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced 
a process, and will infallibly put me into jail. Do, for 
God's sake, send that sum, and that by return of post. 
Forgive me this earnestness, but the horrors of a jail have 
made me half distracted. I do not ask all this gratuitous- 
ly ; for, upon returning health, I hereby promise and en- 
gage to furnish you with five pounds' worth of the neatest 
song-genius you have seen. I tried my hand on Rother- 
murchie this morning. The measure is so difficult that it 
is impossible to infuse much genius into the lines. They 
are on the other side. Forgive, forgive me !" And on 
the other side was written Burns's last song, beginning, 
" Fairest maid, on Devon banks." Was it native feeling, 
or inveterate habit, that made him that morning revert to 
the happier days he had seen on the banks of Devon, and 
sing a last song to one of the two beauties he had there 
admired ? Chambers thinks it was to Charlotte Hamilton ; 
the latest editor refers it to Peggy Chalmers. 

Thomson at once sent the sum asked for. He has been 
much, but not justly, blamed for not having sent a much 
larger sum, and indeed for not having repaid the poet for 
his songs long before. Against such charges it is enough 
to reply that when Thomson had formerly volunteered 
some money to Burns in return for his songs, the indig- 
nant poet told him that if he ever again thought of such 
a thing, their intercourse must thenceforth cease. And 



VII. j LAST YEARS. 181 

for the smallness of the sum sent, it should be remembered 
that Thomson was himself a poor man, and had not at this 
time made anything- by his Collection of Songs, and never 
did make much beyond repayment of his large outlay. 

On the same day on which Burns wrote thus to Thom- 
son, he wrote another letter in much the same terms to his 
cousin, Mr. James Burnes, of Montrose, asking him to as- 
sist him with ten pounds, which was at once sent by his 
relative, who, though not a rich, was a generous - hearted 
man. 

There was still a third letter written on that 12th of 
July (1796) from Brow. Of Mrs. Dunlop, who had for 
some months ceased her correspondence with him, the 
poet takes this affecting farewell :— " I have written you 
so often, without receiving any answer, that I would not 
trouble you again but for the circumstances in which I 
am. An illness which has long hung about me, in all 
probability will speedily send me beyond that 'bourn 
whence no traveller returns.' Your friendship, with 
which for many years you honoured me, was a friendship 
dearest to my soul. Your conversation, and especially 
your correspondence, were at once highly entertaining and 
instructive. With what pleasure did I use to break up 
the seal i The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to 
my poor palpitating heart. Farewell !" 

On the 14th he wrote to his wife, saying that though the 
sea-bathing had eased his pains, it had not done anything 
to restore his health. The following anecdote of him at 
this time has been preserved: — "A night or two before 
Burns left Brow, he drank tea with Mrs. Craig, widow of 
the minister of Ruthwell. His altered appearance excited 
much silent sympathy ; and the evening being beautiful, 
and the sun shinino- brio-htlv throuo^h the casement. Miss 



182 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

Craig (afterwards Mrs. llciiry Duncan) was afraid tlic light 
might be too much for him, and rose to let down the win- 
dow-blinds. Burns immediately guessed what she meant, 
and regarding the young lady with a look of great benig- 
nity, said, ' Thank you, my dear, for your kind attention ; 
but oh ! let him shine : he will not shine long for me.' " 

On the 18th July he left Brow, and returned to Dum- 
fries in a small spring -cart. When he alighted, the on- 
lookers saw that he was hardly able to stand, and observed 
that he walked with tottering steps to his door. Those 
who saw him enter his house, knew by his appearance 
that he would never again cross that threshold alive. 
When the news spread in Dumfries that Burns had re- 
turned from Brow and was dying, the whole town was 
deeply moved. Allan Cunningham, who was present, thus 
describes what he saw : — " The anxiety of the people, high 
and low, was very great. Wherever two or three were to- 
gether, their talk was of Burns, and of him alone. They 
spoke of his history, of his person, and of his works ; of 
his witty sayings, and sarcastic replies, and of his too ear- 
ly fate, with much enthusiasm, and sometimes with deep 
feeling. All that he had done, and all that they had 
hoped he would accomplish, were talked of. Half a doz- 
en of them stopped Dr. Maxwell in the street, and said, 
*How is Burns, sir?' He shook his head, saying, ' He 
cannot be worse,' and passed on to be subjected to similar 
inquiries farther up the way. I heard one of a group in- 
quire, with much simplicity, ' Who do you think will be 
our poet now V " 

During the three or four days between his return from 
Brow and the end, his mind, when not roused by conver- 
sation, wandered in delirium. Yet when friends drew near 
his bed, sallies of his old- wit would for a moment return. 



VII.] LAST YEARS. 183 

To a brother volunteer who came to see him he said, with 
a smile, "John, don't let the awkward squad fire over me." 
His wife was unable to attend him ; and four helpless 
children wandered from room to room gazing on their 
unhappy parents. All the while, Jessie Lewars was min- 
istering to the helpless and to the dying one, and doing 
what kindness could do to relieve their suffering. On the 
fourth day after his return, the 21st of July, Burns sank 
into his last sleep. His children stood around his bed, 
and his eldest son remembered long afterwards all the cir- 
cumstances of that sad hour. 

The news that Burns was dead, sounded through all 
Scotland like a knell announcing a great national bereave- 
ment. Men woke up to feel the greatness of the gift 
which in him had been vouchsafed to their generation, 
and which had met, on the whole, with so poor a recep- 
tion. Self-reproach mingled with the universal sorrow, as 
men asked themselves whether they might not have done 
more to cherish and prolong that rarely gifted life. 

Of course there was a great public funeral, in which the 
men of Dumfries and the neighbourhood, high and low, 
appeared as mourners, and soldiers and volunteers with 
colours, mufiled drums, and arms reversed, not very appro- 
priately mingled in the procession. At the very time 
when they were laying her husband in his grave, Mrs. 
Burns gave birth to his posthumous son. He was called 
Maxwell, after the physician who attended his father, but 
he died in infancy. The spot where the poet was laid 
was in a corner of St. MichaeFs churchyard, and the grave 
remained for a time unmarked by any monument. After 
some years his wife placed over it a plain, unpretending 
stone, inscribed with his name and age, and with the names 
of his two boys, who were buried in the same place. Well 



184 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

had it been, if he had been allowed to rest undisturbed in 
this grave where his family had laid him. But well-mean- 
ing, though ignorant, officiousness would not suffer it to 
be so. Nearly twenty years after the poet's death, a huge, 
cumbrous, unsightly mausoleum was, by public subscrip- 
tion, erected at a little distance from his original resting- 
place. This structure was adorned with an ungraceful fig- 
ure in marble, representing " The muse of Coila finding 
the poet at the plough, and throwing her inspiring mantle 
over him." To this was added a long, rambling epitaph 
in tawdry Latin, as though any inscription which scholars 
could devise could equal the simple name of Robert Burns. 
When the new structure was completed, on the 19th Sep- 
tember, 1815, his grave was opened, and men for a mo- 
ment gazed with awe on the form of Burns, seemingly as 
entire as on the day when first it was laid in the grave. 
But as soon as they began to raise it, the whole body 
crumbled to dust, leaving only the head and bones. These 
relics they bore to the mausoleum which had been pre- 
pared for their reception. But not even yet was the 
poet's dust to be allowed to rest in peace. When his 
widow died, in March, 1834, the mausoleum was opened, 
that she might be laid by her husband's side. Some cra- 
niologists of Dumfries were then permitted, in the name 
of so-called science, to desecrate his dust with their inhu- 
man outrage. At the dead of night, between the 31st of 
March and the 1st of April, these men laid their profane 
fingers on the skull of Burns, " tried their hats upon it, 
and found them all too little;" applied their compasses, 
registered the size of the so-called organs, and " satisfied 
themselves that Burns had capacity enough to compose 
Tarn o' Shanter, The Cotter^s Saturday Night, and To 
Mary in Heaven^ This done, they laid the head once 



Vii.j LAST YEARS. 185 

again in the hallowed ground, where, let us hope, it will be 
disturbed no more. This mausoleum, unsightly though it 
is, has become a place of pilgrimage whither yearly crowds 
of travellers resort from the ends of the earth, to gaze on 
the resting-place of Scotland's peasant poet, and thence 
to pass to that other consecrated place within ruined Dry- 
burgh, where lies the dust of a kindred spirit by his own 
Tweed. 

9 



CHAPTER VIIL 

CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 

If this narrative has in any way succeeded in giving the 
lights and the shadows of Burns's life, little comment 
need now be added. The reader will, it is hoped, gather 
from the brief record of facts here presented a better im- 
pression of the man as he was, in his strength and in his 
weakness, than from any attempt which might have been 
made to bring his various qualities together into a moral 
portrait. Those who wish to see a comment on his char- 
acter, at once wise and tender, should turn to Mr. Carlyle's 
famous essay on Burns. 

What estimate is to be formed of Burns — not as a poet, 
but as a man — is a question that will long be asked, and 
will be variously answered, according to the principles men 
hold, and the temperament they are of. Men of the world 
will regard him one way, worshippers of genius in anoth- 
er; and there are many whom the judgments of neither 
of these will satisfy. One thing is plain to every one ; it 
is the contradiction between the noble gifts he had and 
the actual life he lived, which make his career the painful 
tragedy it was. When, however, we look more closely 
into the original outfit of the man, we seem in some sort 
to see how this came to be. 

Given a being born into the world with a noble nature, 



CHAP.viii.] CHARACTER, rOEMS, S0XG8. 187 

endowments of head and heart beyond any of his time, 
wide-ranging sympathies, intellectual force of the strongest 
man, sensibility as of the tenderest woman, possessed also 
by a keen sense of right and wrong which he had brought 
from a pure home — place all these high gifts on the one 
side, and over against them a lower nature, fierce and tur- 
bulent, filling him with wild passions which were hard to 
restrain and fatal to indulge — and between these two op- 
posing natures, a weak and irresolute will, which could over- 
hear the voice of conscience, but had no strength to obey 
it; launch such a man on such a world as this, and it is 
but too plain what the end will be. From earliest man- 
hood till the close, flesh and spirit were waging within 
him interminable war, and who shall say which had the 
victory ? Among his countrymen there are many who are 
so captivgjted with his brilliant gifts and his genial tem- 
perament, that they will not listen to any hint at the deep 
defects which marred them. Some would even go so far 
as to claim honour for him, not only as Scotland's greatest 
poet, but as one of the best men she has produced. Those 
who thus try to canonize Burns are no true friends to his 
memory. They do but challenge the counter-verdict, and 
force men to recall facts which, if they cannot forget, they 
would fain leave in silence. These moral defects it is ours 
to know ; it is not ours to judge him who had them. 

While some would claim for Burns a niche among Scot- 
land's saints, others would give him rank as one of her 
religious teachero. This claim, if not so absurd as the 
other, is hardly more tenable. The religion described by 
Burns in The Cotter^s Saturday Night is, it should be re- 
membered, his father's faith, not his own. The funda- 
mental truths of natural religion, faith in God and in im- 
• mortality, amid sore trials of heart, he no doubt clung to, 



KSf; liOBEKT liUKXS. [chap. 

and has forcibly expressed. But there is nothing in his 
poems or in his letters which goes beyond sincere deism — 
nothing which is in any way distinctively Christian. 

Even were his teaching of reHgion much fuller than it 
is, one essential thing is still wanting. Before men can 
accept any one as a religious teacher, they not unreason- 
ably expect that his practice should in some measure bear 
out his teaching. It was not as an authority on such 
matters that Burns ever regarded himself. In his Bard's 
Ejyitaph, composed ten years before his death, he took a 
far truer and humbler measure of himself than any of his 
critics or panegyrists have done : 

" The poor inhabitant below 
Was quick to learn and wise to know, 
And keenly felt the friendly glow 

And softer flame ; • 

But thoughtless folly laid him low, 
And stained his name. 

" Reader, attend ! whether thy soul 
Soars fancy's flight beyond the pole, 
Or darkling grubs this earthly hole. 

In low pursuit ; 
Know, prudent, cautious self-control 

Is wisdom's root." 

"A confession," says Wordsworth, "at once devout, poetr 
ical, and human — a history in the shape of a prophecy." 
Leaving the details of his personal story, and — 

" Each unquiet theme. 
Where gentlest judgments may misdeem," 

it is a great relief to turn to the bequest that he has left 
to the world in his poetry. How often has one been 
tempted to wish that we had known as little of the actual 



VIII.] C'HAKAOTEK, TOEMS, SOXC^S. ISO 

career of Burns as we do of the life of Shakespeare, or 
even of Homer, and had been left to read his mind and 
character only by the light of his works ! That poetry, 
though a fragmentary, is still a faithful transcript of what 
was best in the man ; and though his stream of song con- 
tains some sediment we could wish away, yet as a whole, 
how vividly, clearly, sunnily it flows ! how far the good 
preponderates over the evil ! 

What that good is must now be briefly said. To take 
his. earliest productions first, his poems as distinct from 
his songs. Almost all the best of these are, with the 
one notable exception of Tarn 0'' Shanter, contained in the 
Kilmarnock edition. A few pieces actually composed be- 
fore he went to Edinburgh were included in later editions, 
but after leaving Mossgiel he never seriously addressed 
himself to any form of poetry but song-writing. The Kil- 
marnock volume contains poems descriptive of peasant life 
and manners, epistles in verse generally to rhyming breth- 
ren, a few lyrics on personal feelings, or on incidents like 
those of the mouse and the daisy, and three songs. In 
these, the form, the metre, the style and language, even 
that which is known as Burns's peculiar stanza, all belong 
to the traditional forms of his country's poetry, and from 
earlier bards had been handed down to Burns by his two 
immediate forerunners, Ramsay and Fergusson. To these 
two he felt himself indebted, and for them he always ex- 
presses a somewhat exaggerated admiration. Nothing can 
more show Burns's inherent power than to compare his 
poems with even the best of those which he accepted as 
models. The old framework and metres which his coun- 
try supplied, he took ; asked no other, no better, and into 
those old bottles poured new wine of his own, and such 
wine ! What, then, is the peculiar flavour of this now po- 



190 . ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

etic wine of Burns's poetry 2 At the basis of all his pow- 
er lay absolute truthfulness, intense reality, truthfulness to 
the objects which he saw, truthfulness to himself as the 
seer of them. This is what Wordsworth recognized as 
Burns's leading characteristic. He who acknowledged 
few masters, owned Burns as his master in this respect 
when he speaks of him — 

" Whose light I hailed when first it shone, 
And showed my youth, 
How verse may build a princely throne * 

On humble truth." 

Here was a man, a son of toil, looking out on the world 
from his cottage, on society low and high, and on nature 
homely or beautiful, with the clearest eye, the most pierc- 
ing insight, and the warmest heart; touching life at a 
hundred points, seeing to the core all the sterling worth, 
nor less the pretence and hollowness of the men he met, 
the humour, the drollery, the pathos, and the sorrow of 
human existence ; and expressing what he saw, not in the 
stock' phrases of books, but in his own vernacular, the lan- 
guage of his fireside, with a directness, a force, a vitality 
that tingled to the finger tips, and forced the phrases of 
his peasant dialect into literature, and made them for ever 
classical. Large sympathy, generous enthusiasm, reckless 
abandonment, fierce indignation, melting compassion, rare 
flashes of moral insight, all are there. Everywhere you 
see the strong intellect made alive, and driven home to the 
mark, by the fervid heart behind it. And if the sight of 
the world's inequalities, and some natural repining at his 
own obscure lot, mingled from the beginning, as has been 
said, " some bitterness of earthly spleen and passion with 
the workings of his inspiration, and if these in the end ate 



viii.] CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 191 

deep into the great heart tliey had long tormented," who 
that has not known his experience may venture too strong- 
ly to condemn him ? 

This prevailing truthfulness of nature and of vision 
manifested itself in many ways. 'First. In the strength 
of it, he interpreted the lives, thoughts, feelings, manners 
of the Scottish peasantry to whom he belonged, as they 
had never been interpreted before, and never can be again. 
Take the poem which stands first in the Kilmarnock edi- 
tion. The Cotter's Dog and the Laird's Dog are, as has 
been often said, for all their moralizing, true dogs in all 
their ways. Yet through these, while not ceasing to be 
dogs, the poet represents the whole contrast between the 
Cotters' lives, and their Lairds'. This old controversy, 
which is ever new, between rich and poor, has never been 
set forth with more humour and power. No doubt it is 
done from the peasant's point of view. The virtues and 
hardships of the poor have full justice done to them ; the 
prosperity of the rich, with its accompanying follies and 
faults, is not spared, perhaps it is exaggerated. The whole 
is represented with an inimitably graphic hand, and just 
when the caustic wit is beginning to get too biting, the 
edge of it is turned by a touch of kindlier humour. The 
poor dog speaks of 

" Some gentle master, 
Wha, aiblins thrang a-parliamentin. 
For Britain's guid his saul indentin — " 

Then Caesar, the rich man's dog, replies — 

" Haith, lad, ye little ken about it : 
For Britain's guid ! — guid faith ! I doubt it. 
Say rather, gaun as Premiers lead him, 
An' saying aye or no 's they bid him : 



192 KOBERT BURNS. [chap. 

At operas an' plays parading, 
Mortgaging, gambling, masquerading : 
Or, may be, in a frolic daft. 
To Hague or Calais takes a waft, 
To make a tour an' tak a whirl, 
To learn hon ton^ an' see the worl'. 

" Then, at Vienna or Versailles, 
I He rives his father's auld entails ; 

Or by Madrid he takes the rout. 
To thrum guitars and fecht wi' nowt. 

***** 

For Britain's guid ! for her destruction ! 
Wi' dissipation, feud an' faction." 

Then exclaims Luath, the poor man's dog — 

" Hech, man ! dear sirs ! is that the gate 
They waste sae mony a braw estate ! 
Are we sae foughten and harass'd 
For gear to gang that gate at last ?" 

And yet he allows, that for all that 

" Thae frank, rantin', ramblin' billies, 

Fient haet o' them's ill-hearted fellows." 

" Mark the power of that one word, ' nowt,' " said the 
late Thomas Aird. " If the poet had said that om' young 
fellows went to Spain to fight with bulls, there would have 
been some dignity in the thing, but think of his going all 
that way 'to fecht wi' nowt.' It was felt at once to be 
ridiculous. That one word conveyed at once a statement 
of the folly, and a sarcastic rebuke of the folly." 

Or turn to the poem of Halloween. Here he has 
sketched the Ayrshire peasantry as they appeared in their 
hours of merriment — painted with a few vivid strokes a 
dozen distinct pictures of country lads and lasses, sires and 



Till.] CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 193 

dames, and at the same time preserved for ever the re- 
membrance of antique customs and superstitious observ- 
ances, which even in Burns's day were beginning to fade, 
and have now all but disappeared. 

Or again, take The auld Farmer's New-year-morning 
Salutation to his auld Mare. In this homely, but most 
kindly humorous poem, you have the whole toiling life 
of a ploughman and his horse, done off in two or three 
touches, and the elements of what may seem a common- 
place, but was to Burns a most vivid, experience, are made 
to live for ever. For a piece of good graphic Scotch, see 
how he describes the sturdy old mare in the plough set- 
ting her face to the furzy braes. 

" Thou never braing't, an' fetch't, and fliskit, 
But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit, 
An' spread abreed thy weel-fill'd brisket, 

Wi' pith an' pow'r, 
Till spritty knowes wad rair't and riskit, 

An' slypet owre." 

To paraphrase this, " Thou didst never fret, or plunge 
and kick, but thou wouldest have whisked thy old tail, 
and spread abroad thy large chest, with pith and power, 
till hillocks, where the earth was filled with tough-rooted 
plants, would have given forth a cracking sound, and the 
clods fallen gently over." The latter part of this para- 
phrase is taken from Chambers. What pure English 
words could have rendered these things as compactly and 
graphically ? 

Of The Cotter s Saturday Night it is hardly needful 
to speak. As a work of art, it is by no means at Burns's 
highest level. The metre was not native to him. It con- 
tains some lines that are feeble, whole stanzas that are 

9* 



194 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

heavy. But as Lockbart has said, in words already quoted, 
there is none of his poems that does such justice to the 
better nature that was originally in him. It shows how. 
Burns could reverence the old national piety, however lit- 
tle he may have been able to practise it. It is the more 
valuable for this, that it is almost the only poem in which 
either of our two great national poets has described Scot- 
tish character on the side of that grave, deep, though un- 
demonstrative reverence, which has been an intrinsic ele- 
ment in it. 

No wonder the peasantry of Scotland have loved Burns 
as perhaps never people loved a poet. He not only sym- 
pathized with the wants, the trials, the joys and sorrows 
of their obscure lot, but he interpreted these to them- 
selves, and interpreted them to others, and this too in their 
own language, made musical and glorified by genius. He 
made the poorest ploughman proud of his station and his 
toil, since Robbie Burns had shared and had sung them. 
He awoke a sympathy for them in many a heart that oth- 
erwise would never have known it. In looking up to him, 
the Scottish people have seen an impersonation of them- 
selves on a large scale — of themselves, both in their virtues 
and in their vices. 

Secondly. Burns in his poetry was not only the inter- 
preter of Scotland's peasantry, he was the restorer of her 
nationality. When he appeared, the spirit of Scotland 
was at a low ebb. The fatigue that foljowed a century of 
religious strife, the extinction of her Parliament, the stern 
suppression of the Jacobite risings, the removal of all sym- 
bols of her royalty and nationality, had all but quenched 
the ancient spirit. Englishmen despised Scotchmen, and 
Scotchmen seemed ashamed of themselves and of their 
country. A race of literary men had sprung up in Edin- 



VIII.] CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 195 

burgh who, as to national feeling, were entirely colourless, 
Scotchmen in nothing except their dwelling-place. The 
thing they most dreaded was to be convicted of a Scotti- 
cism. Among these learned cosmopolitans in walked 
Burns, who with the instinct of genius chose for his sub- 
ject that Scottish life which they ignored, and for his 
vehicle that vernacular which they despised, and who, 
touching the springs of long-forgotten emotions, brought 
back on the hearts of his countrymen a tide of patriotic 
feeling to which they had long been strangers. 

At first it was only his native Ayrshire he hoped to 
illustrate ; to shed upon the streams of Ayr and Doon the 
power of Yarrow, and Teviot, and Tweed. But his patri- 
otism was not merely local ; the traditions of Wallace 
haunted him like a passion, the wanderings of Bruce he 
hoped to dramatize. His well-known words about the 
Thistle have been already quoted. They express what 
was one of his strongest aspirations. And though he ac- 
complished but a small part of what he once hoped to do, 
yet we owe it to him first of all that " the old kingdom " 
has not wholly sunk into a province. If Scotchmen to- 
day love and cherish their country with a pride unknown 
to their ancestors of the last century, if strangers of all 
countries look on Scotland as a land of romance, this we 
owe in great measure to Burns, who first turned the tide, 
which Scott afterwards carried to full flood. All that 
Scotland had done and suffered, her romantic history, the 
manhood of her people, the beauty of her scenery, would 
have disappeared in modern commonplace and manufact- 
uring ugliness, if she had been left without her two " sa- 
cred poets." 

Thirdly. Burns's sympathies and thoughts were not 
confined to class nor country ; they had something more 



196 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

catholic in them, they reached to universal man. Few as 
were his opportunities of knowing the characters of states- 
men and politicians, yet with what " random shots o' 
countra wit " did he hit off the public men of his time ! 
In his address to King George III. on his birthday, how 
gay yet caustic is the satire, how trenchant his stroke ! 
The elder and the younger Pitt, " yon ill-tongued tinkler 
Charlie Fox," as he irreverently calls him — if Burns had 
sat for years in Parliament, he could scarcely have known 
them better. Every one of the Scottish M.P.'s of the 
time, from — 



to- 



and — 



'That slee auld-farran chiel Dundas" 

That glib-gabbit Highland baron 

The Laird o' Graham," 

Erskine a spunkie Norlan billie," 



— he has touched their characters as truly as if they had 
all been his own familiars. But of his intuitive knowledge 
of men of all ranks there is no need to speak, for every 
line he writes attests it. Of his fetches of moral wisdom 
something has already been said. He would not have 
been a Scotchman, if he had not been a moralizer; but 
then his moralizings are not platitudes, but truths winged 
with wit and wisdom. He had, as we have seen, his limi- 
tations — his bias to overvalue one order of qualities, and 
to disparage others. Some pleading of his own cause and 
that of men of his own temperament, some disparagement 
of the severer, less-impulsive virtues, it is easy to discern 
in him. Yet, allowing all this, what flashes of moral in- 
sight, piercing to the quick ! what random sayings flung 
forth, that have become proverbs in all lands — " mottoes 
of the heart !" 



viii.l CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 197 

^^ 

Such are — \ ^ 

" wad some Power the giftie gie us, 
To see oursel as ithers see us : 1/ 

It wad frae mony a blunder free us, 
An' foolish notion ;" 
Or the much-quoted — q \ 

"Facts are chiels that winna ding .y' 

And downa be disputed ;" 



Or- 



" The heart ay's the part ay 

That makes us right or wrang." 



Who on the text, "He that is without sin among you, 
let him first cast a stone," ever preached such a sermon 
as Burns in his Address to the unco Guid? and in his 
epistle of advice to a young- friend, what wisdom ! what in- 
cisive aphorisms ! In passages like these scattered through- 
out his writings, and in some single poems, he has passed 
beyond all bonds of place and nationality, and spoken 
home to the universal human heart. 

And here we may note that in that awakening to the 
sense of human brotherhood, the oneness of human nature, 
which began towards the end of last century, and which 
found utterance through Cowper first of the English poets, 
there has been no voice in literature, then or since, which 
has proclaimed it more tellingly than Burns. And then 
his humanity was not confined to man, it overflowed to 
his lower fellow-creatures. His lines about the pet ewe, 
the worn-out mare, the field-mouse, the wounded hare, 
have long been household words. In this tenderness to- 
wards animals we see another point of likeness between 
him and Cowper. 

Fourthly. For all aspects of the natural world he has 
the same clear eye, the same open heart that he has for 
man. His love of nature is intense, but very simple and 



198 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

direct, no subtilizings, nor refinings about it, nor any of 
that nature -worship which soon after his time came in. 
Quite unconsciously, as a child might, he goes into the 
outward world for refreshment, for enjoyment, for sym- 
pathy. Everywhere in his poetry, nature comes in, not so 
much as a being independent of man, but as the back- 
ground of his pictures of life and human character. How 
true his perceptions of her features are, how pure and 
transparent the feeling she awakens in him! Take only 
two examples. Here is the well-known way he describes 
the burn in his Halloioeen — 

" Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays, 
As thro' the glen it wimpl't ; 
Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays, 

Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't ; 
Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays, 

Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle ; 
Whyles cookit underneath the braes. 
Below the spreading hazel, 

Unseen that night." 

Was ever burn so naturally, yet picturesquely described ? 
The next verse can hardly be omitted — 

" Amang the brachens on the brae, 

Between her an' the moon, 

The deil, or else an outler quey. 

Gat up an' gae a croon : 
Poor Lcezie's heart maist lap the hool ; 

Near lav'rock height she jumpit ; 
But raiss'd a fit, an' in the pool 
Out-owre the lugs she plumpit, 

Wi' a plunge that night." 

" Maist lap the hool," what condensation in that Scotch 
phrase ! The hool is the pod of a pea — poor Lizzie's heart 
almost leapt out of its encasing sheath. 



VIII.] CHARACTEK, POEMS, SONGS. VJ'J 

Or look at this other picture : 

" Upon a simmer Sunday morn, 
When Nature's face is fair, 
I walked forth to view the corn, 

And snuff the caller air. 
The risiii' sun owre Galston muirs 

Wi' glorious light was gUntin ; 
The hares Avere hirplin down the furrs, 
The lav'rocks they were chantin 

Fu' sweet that day." 

I have noted only some of the excellences of Burns's 
poetry, which far outnumber its blemishes. Of these last 
it is unnecessary to speak ; they are too obvious, and what- 
ever is gross, readers can of themselves pass by. 

Burns's most considerable poems, as distinct from his 
songs, were almost all written before he went to Edin- 
burgh. There is, how^ever, one memorable exception. Tam 
o' Shanter, as we have seen, belongs to EUisland days. 
Most of his earlier poems were entirely realistic, a tran- 
script of the men and women and scenes he had seen and 
known, only lifted a very little off the earth, only very 
slightly idealized. But in Tmn o' Shanter lie had let 
loose his powers upon the materials of past experiences, 
and out of them he shaped a tale which was a pure imag- 
inative creation. In no other instance, except perhaps in 
The Jolly Beggars, had he done tliis ; and in that cantata, 
if the genius is equal, the materials are so coarse, and the 
sentiment so gross, as to make it, for all its dramatic pow- 
er, decidedly offensive. It is strange what very opposite 
judgments have been formed of the intrinsic merit of Tam 
o' Shanter. Mr. Carlyle thinks that it might have been 
written "all but quite as well by a man, who, in place of 
genius, had only possessed talent; that it is not so much a 



200 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. 

poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric ; the heart of the 
story still lies hard and dead." On the other hand, Sir 
Walter Scott has recorded this verdict : " In the inimita- 
ble tale of Tarn o' Shanter, Burns has left us sufficient evi- 
dence of his abilities to combine the ludicrous with the 
awful and even the horrible. No poet, with the exception 
of Shakespeare, ever possessed the power of exciting the 
most varied and discordant emotions with such rapid tran- 
sitions. His humorous description of death in the poem on 
Dr. Hornbrook, borders on the terrific ; and the witches' 
dance in the Kirk of Alloway is at once ludicrous and hor- 
rible." Sir AValter, I believe, is right, and the world has 
sided with him in his judgment about Tarn o' Shanter. 
Nowhere in British literature, out of Shakespeare, is there 
to be found so much of the power of which Scott speaks 
— that of combining in rapid transition almost contradic- 
tory emotions — if we except perhaps one of Scott's own 
highest creations, the tale of Wandering AVillie, in Red- 
gauntlet. 

On the songs of Burns a volume might be written, but 
a few sentences must here suffice. It is in his songs that 
his soul comes out fullest, freest, brightest ; it is as a song- 
writer that his fame has spread widest, and will longest 
last. Mr. Carlyle, not in his essay, which does full justice 
to Burns's songs, but in some more recent work, has said 
something like this, " Our Scottish son of thunder had, 
for want of a better, to pour his lightning through the 
narrow cranny of Scottish song — the narrowest cranny 
ever vouchsafed to any son of thunder." The narrowest, 
it may be, but the most effective, if a man desires to come 
close to his fellow-men, soul to soul. Of all forms of lit- 
erature the genuine song is the most penetrating, and the 
most to ])c remembered ; and in this kind Burns is the su- 



VIII.] CUARACTEK, POEMS, SONGS. 201 

prciiic master. To make him this, two things combined. 
First, there was the great background of national melody 
and antique verse, coming down to him from remote ages, 
and sounding through his heart from childhood. He was 
cradled in a very atmosphere of melody, else he never 
could have sung so well. No one knew better than he 
did, or would have owned more feelingly, how much he 
owed to the old forgotten song-writers of his country, dead 
for ages before he lived, and lying in their unknown graves 
all Scotland over. From his boyhood he had studied ea- 
gerly the old tunes, and the old words where there were 
such, that had come down to him from the past, treasured 
every scrap of antique air and verse, conned and crooned 
them over till he had them by heart. This was the one 
form of literature that he had entirely mastered. And 
from the first he had laid it down as a rule, that the one 
way to catch the inspiration, and rise to the true fervour 
of song, was, as he phrased it, " to soivth the tune over 
and over," till the words came spontaneously. The words 
of his own songs were inspired by pre-existing tunes, not 
composed first, and set to music afterwards. But all this 
love and study of the ancient songs and outward melody 
would have gone for nothing, but for the second element, 
that is the inward melody born in the poet's deepest heart, 
which received into itself the whole body of national song; 
and then when it had passed through his soul, sent it forth 
ennobled and glorified by his own genius. 

That which fitted him to do this was the peculiar inten- 
sity of his nature, the fervid heart, the trembling sensibil- 
ity, the headlong passion, all thrilling through an intellect 
strong and keen beyond that of other men. How myste- 
rious to reflect that the same qualities on their emotional 
side made him the great songster of the world, and on 



2(12 KOBERT BURNS. [chai'. 

their practical side drove liim to ruin ! The first word 
which Burns composed was a song in praise of his partner 
on the harvest-rig ; the last utterance he breathed in verse 
was also a song — a faint remembrance of some former 
affection. Between these two he composed from two to 
three hundred. It might be wished, perhaps, that he had 
written fewer, especially fewer love songs ; never composed 
under pressure, and only when his heart was so full he 
could not help singing. This is the condition on which 
alone the highest order of songs is born. Probably from 
thirty to forty songs of Burns could be named which come 
up to this highest standard. No other Scottish song-writ- 
ci* could show above four or five of the same quality. Of 
his songs one main characteristic is that their subjects, the 
substance they lay hold of, belongs to what is most per- 
manent in humanity, those primary affections, those per- 
manent relations of life which cannot change while man's 
nature is what it is. In this they are wholly unlike those 
songs which seize on the changing aspects of society. As 
the phases of social life change, these are forgotten. But 
no time can superannuate the subjects which Burns has 
sung; they are rooted in the primary strata, which are 
steadfast. Then, as the subjects are primary, so the feel- 
ing with which Burns regards them is primary too — that 
is, he gives us the first spontaneous gush — the first throb 
of his heart, and that a most strong, simple, manly heart. 
The feeling is not turned over in the reflective faculty, and 
there artistically shaped — not subtilized and refined away 
till it has lost its power and freshness; but given at first 
hand, as it comes warm from within. When he is at his 
best, you seem to hear the whole song warbling through 
his spirit, naturally as a bird's. The whole subject is 
wrapped in an element of music, till it is penetrated and 



VIII.] CHAKACTEK, POEMS, SONGS. 203 

transfigured by it. No one else has so much of the native 
lilt in him. When his mind was at the white heat, it is 
wonderful how quickly he struck off some of his most per- 
fect songs. And yet he could, when it was required, go 
back upon them, and retouch them line by line, as we saw 
him doing in Ve Banks and Braes. In the best of them 
the outward form is as perfect as the inward music is all- 
pervading, and the two are in complete harmony. 

To mention a few instances in which he has given their 
ultimate and consummate expression to fundamental hu- 
man emotions, four songs may be mentioned, in each of 
v/hich a different phase of love has been rendered for all 

time — 

" Of a' the airts the wind can blaw," 

" Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon," 

" Go fetch to me a pint o' wine ;" 

and that other, in which the calm depth of long-wedded 
and happy love utters itself, so blithely yet pathetically — 

"John Anderson, my Jo, John." 

Then for comic humour of courtship, there is — 
" Duncan Gray cam here to woo." 

For that contented spirit which, while feeling life's trou- 
bles, yet keeps '' aye a heart aboon them a','' we have — 

" Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair." 

For friendship rooted in the past, there is — 

" Should auld acquaintance be forgot," 

eren if we credit antiquity with some of the verses. 

For wild and reckless daring, mingled with a dash of 
O 



204 EGBERT BURNS. [chap, 

finer feeling, there is Macpherson's Farewell. For patri- 
otic heroism — 

" Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled ;" 

and for personal independence, and sturdy, if self-assert- 
ing, manhood — 

" A man's a man for a' that." 

These are but a few of the many permanent emotions to 
which Burns has given such consumnjate expression, as 
will stand for all time. 

In no mention of his songs should that be forgotten 
which is so greatly to the honour of Burns. He was em- 
phatically the purifier of Scottish song. There are some 
poems he has left, there are also a few among his songs, 
which we could wish that he had never written. But we 
who inherit Scottish song as he left it, can hardly imagine 
how much he did to purify and elevate our national melo- 
dies. To see what he has done in this way, we have but 
to compare Burns's songs with the collection of Scottish 
songs published by David Herd, in 1769, a few years be- 
fore Burns appeared. A genuine poet, who knew well 
what he spoke of, the late Thomas Aird, has said, " Those 
old Scottish melodies, sweet and strong though they were, 
strong and sweet, were, all the more for their very strength 
and sweetness, a moral plague, from the indecent words 
to which many of them had long been set. How was the 
plague to'be stayed? All the preachers in the land could 
not divorce the grossness from the music. The only way 
was to put something better in its stead. This inestimable 
something better Burns gave us." 

So purified and ennobled by Burns, these songs embody 
human emotion in its most condensed and sweetest es- 
sence. They appeal to all ranks, they touch all ages, they 



viii.J CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 20r, 

cheer toil -worn men under every clime. Wherever tlie 
English tongue is heard, beneath the suns of India, amid 
African deserts, on the western prairies of America, among 
the squatters of Australia, whenever men of British blood 
would give vent to their deepest, kindliest, most genial 
feelings, it is to the songs of Burns they spontaneously 
turn, and find in them at once a perfect utterance, and a 
fresh tie of brotherhood. It is this which forms Burns's 
most enduring claim on the world's gratitude. 



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